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BLOOD AND SOIL
Richard Walther Darré and Hitler’s ‘Green
| Party’

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bramwell, Anna
Blood and soil: Walther Darré and Hitler's
Green Party.
1. Darré, Walther 2. Politicians—
Germany — Biography
I. Title
943.086'092'4 DD247.D3

ISBN 0-946041-33-4

Published by The Kensal Press
Kensal House, Abbotsbrook, Bourne End, Buckingkamshire.

Typeset, printed and bound in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd,
Frome, Somerset.

‘Some of his ideas were novel and somewhat
bizarre, but it is not a crime to evolve and advocate
new or even unsound social and economic theories’.

—Judgement on Darré, TWCN, xvi, p. 555

‘En effet, la haine est une liqueur précieuse, un
poison plus cher que celui des Borgia—car il est fait
avec notre sang, notre santé, notre sommeil, et les
deux tiers de notre amour! Il faut en être avare!

—Baudelaire, ‘Conseils aux Jeunes
Littérateurs’, L’ Art Romantique, p. 58.

Richard Walther Darre ’. (F. Krausse, Goslar)

Preface

This book is a political biography of R. Walther Darré, Minister of
Agriculture under the Nazis from 1933 to 1942, and populariser of the
slogan ‘Blood and Soil’. As the title of the book implies, he headed a
group of agrarian radicals who, among other issues, were concerned
with what we now call ecological problems. While not a formal party
grouping, they were a significant enough power bloc to perturb Hitler,
Himmler and Heydrich. Although it was not possible to provide a
comprehensive biographical study of the Green Nazis in the space
available here, it is hoped that this biography of Darré will be a step in
that direction.

I am grateful to the staff of the City Archive, Goslar, the Federal
Archive, Coblenz, the Institute for Contemporary History, Munich,
and Mr Wells of the Wiener Library, London, for their valuable
assistance and courtesy. A grant from the British Academy enabled me
to complete my research in the Goslar and Munich Archives.
Correspondents are too numerous to list here, but an exception must
be made for the Registrar of King’s College School, Wimbledon, who
kindly answered my questions about their old boy, Darré, while special
thanks are due to those who opened their personal files and their
memories to me, and who, across a gap of language, generation,
culture and conviction, tried to communicate their perspectives. Ursula
Backe permitted me to read and use the restricted Backe papers at
Coblenz, and use extracts from her diary, while Frau Ohlendorf, Frau
Meyer, Hans Deetjens, F. Krausse, Professor Haushofer, Dr Hans
Merkl, Dr R. Proksch and Princess Marie Reuss zur Lippe granted
interviews and wrote at length answering my questions.

I would like to thank Mrs Celia Clarke, Press Officer of the British
Warm-Blood Society for information about the Trakhener horse, and I
am greatly indebted to Dr John Clarke, Reader in History, University
of Buckingham: Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford, for his long-
term interest in and encouragement of this project.

Por permission to use matezial that first appeared in my article
‘R.W. Darré: Was He Father of the Greens?’ (September, 1984) thanks
are due to Juliet Gardner, editor of History Today, also to the editors of

Preface

the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (JASO), for their
kind permission to reproduce extracts from my article ‘German
Identity Transformed’, published in JASO, vol. XVI, no. 1, Hilary,
1985. `

Historians are becoming more and more modest. It is now
customary to regard the writing of a history book as essentially a

collective act, where praise is due to the collective body, and blame .
alone accrues to the author. Writing this book was an unfashionably

individual and solitary activity, and praise as well as blame is mine
alone. I would like to stress, with more sincerity than is usual, my sole
and complete responsibility for the contents.

Contents

List of Illustrations .

Introduction .
Chapter One

.. Chapter Two

Chapter Three
Chapter Four:
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Conclusion .

Appendix

- Note on Sources

WhowasDarre? .
Odin’s Ravens Se:
The ‘Sign From Thor’ .
The Conspiracy .
The Nazi Minister

‘The Praetorian Guard led by a Jesuit .

Poland: ‘Germany’s Ireland’
The Green Nazis .
Catharsis

List of Abbreviations .

Notes. .
Bibliography
Index .

List of Illustrations

Richard Walther Darre. (F. Krausse, Goslar)
Between pages 152 and 153

Tablet commemorating Darre, Blood and Soil, and Goslar. (Goslar
Archive)
Soslar becomes Germany’s National Peasant City. 1934
Darré waits to address a meeting in Goslar.
Darré’s birthplace in Belgrano, Argentina. (Goslar Archive)
Darré giving a pep talk to the leaders of the National Food Estate.

(Mrs N. Backe)
Niirnburg postcard, 1935
Darré and his wife at the medieval ex-monastery at Goslar. (Mrs N.
3acke)
Commemoration stone at Goslar.
ditler at the Harvest Festival Rally at the Buekeberg. 1935 (Mrs N.
3acke) ;
Troops parade through Goslar, the new peasant city. (Goslar Archive)
?easant labour in new settlements. (Goslar Archive)

viii

Frontispiece `

Introduction

In 1930, European agriculture faced one of its worst depressions.
Peasant movements, farmers’ leagues and agitation for land reform
became politically active in many countries. In some, the rhetoric had
left-wing overtones: in others, it carried a vehemently radical
nationalism. Generally, it was populist and anti-institutionalist, and
potentially violent.

In one European nation, a government came to power partly

- through the votes of disaffected small farmers. lt proceeded to

introduce laws establishing hereditary tenure for small and medium
sized farms. The wholesale food industry was virtually abolished, and a
marketing system established which set prices and controlled quality.
Later, quotas were introduced. This corporation was run by a quasi-
independent ‘quango’. Some two thirds of its farmland was taken out
of the free market by the laws, and control of a farm which came
within the regulations was made conditional on farming ability. A
Back-to-the-Land programme was introduced, which established
viable peasant settlements, and poured money into the rural
infrastructure where the settlements were located. A drive to increase
peasant productivity was introduced, which was remarkably successful
in coaxing more productivity per hectare from the land, and in
increasing intensive agriculture. The agricultural experiment lasted
some six years, until the country went to war. While the legislation
remained on the statute book, agriculture fell under wartime controls,
and the Back-to-the-Land movement tailed off.!

In the 1930s, the name of the man responsible for this legislation,
this experiment in anti-capitalist agriculture, was widely familiar.?
Today, it is virtually unknown, except where academic text-book
writers have mentioned him in passing as a trivial, insincere fool. The
programme outlined above has been labelled with adjectives like
‘fanatical, irrational, insane, primitive, inhuman, monomaniac, brutal,
bloody, reactionary, unproven’, and even ‘unprogressive’, a particularly
crushing blow. The legislation itself has been described as unreal,
Utopian, wishful thinking, not particularly original anyway, and

Introduction

insincere. Primitive and mystical are probably the most commonly
used adjectives, with insane running a close third.?

But why is this? Why should measures which have been advocated
by people of all political persuasions as solutions to problems of land
tenure and agricultural marketing in the Third World today be
considered primitive and insane? The answer is, that the country in
question was. Nazi Germany. This has affected the history of its
agricultural experiments in several ways. First, historians who specialise

in one country tend in any case to see that country’s problems and `

policies as unique. This applies with much greater force to historians of
Nazi Germany. There has been a reluctance to examine these policies
in comparison with those of the Successor States in the 1920s and
1930s, to say nothing of the problems of peasant societies today. The
existence of a large (in comparison with Britain) agricultural
population—some 29% in 1930—has been seen as something to do
with Germany’s lamentable lack of western European humanitarian
democracy, part of a structural political problem which prevented
Germany, as Golo Mann says, fulfilling its true role in the world, that
of being the first nation to combine advanced industrialisation with
truly humanitarian, internationalist, social democracy.* Reading history
backwards has its problems, especially when it is done from the highly
politicised (and nearly always social democratic) viewpoint natural to
historians of Nazi Germany. The second problem is that the
agricultural sector tends to be seen exclusively in its function of non-
urban, hence non-urban liberal/democratic, obstruction to progress.
German landowners, despite their homely, impoverished lifestyle, are
associated with Prussian militarism and the German élite that ruled
through the caste-oriented political structure of the nineteenth century,
and never have had a good press, then or now (nor do they receive
much sympathy in this work, an omission which the author hopes to
rectify in a future book).5 Historians, then, who on the whole realise
that they are an urban luxury, see no reason to sympathise with a
sector which is associated with incest-in-the-pig-sty at the lower socio-
economic end of the scale, and beastly Junkers at the other. Third,
National Socialist Germany is seen loosely (if mistakenly) by many
historians as an extension of right-wing, neo-conservative, capitalist,
authoritarian and élitist policies, coupled with an exclusivist, racialist
nationalism carried to the point of self-destruction. Historians who feel
in themselves a warm sympathy towards neo-conservative, capitalist,
authoritarian or élitist policies will shudder and go away, muttering as
they go that Stalin was just as bad, anyway, but leaving the field open

Introduction

to internationalist social democrat sympathisers, who can only
examine the exceedingly broad church manifestations of National
Socialism (from technology, to art, architecture and science, for
example) through their own progressive prejudices. Not unnaturally,
they soon run out of categorisational capacity. Some recent work,
scholarly and scrupulously annotated as it is, seems to consist largely of
desperately strung together adjectives. National Socialism is romantic,
and modernistic: it is technocratic and backward-looking. It is petty
bourgeois and has aristocratic pretensions: it is reactionary and
pragmatic. The frenetic air that characterises so much recent writing on
the period—carried out, one must stress, by fine scholars—shows that

- an obstruction has been reached. How can one summarise simply and

clearly a movement that moved from being anti-parliamentary and
revolutionary to a mass, legal parliamentary movement: that had only
six years of peace and five years of war; that rapidly ran the gamut
from populist radicalism to dictatorship: that seems unique, yet shows
continuity. How is one to label those Germans who continued to work
under National Socialism, in the field of scholarship, science and, of
course, everyday life? Are all their products, their achievements, their
errors, too, to be considered as archetypal National Socialism? Might
they have developed that way in any case? How can one distinguish

"what was German in 1933-45 and what was Nazi?”

The need so to distinguish is demonstrated by the tangle of
conflicting categories that historians have created, so that on the whole
one has to turn from political and diplomatic historians for a
comparative and contextual examination of this period, to historical
geographers, economic historians, historians who specialise in science,
or architecture, and military historians.®

In many other areas of intellectual history, emphasis has shifted
over the years from one aspect of a movement to another. Sometimes
there is a consensus over what is the ‘real’ phenomenon. For example,

Newton’s gravity theory is seen as the real Newton, while his.
Rosicrucianism is seen as a kind of irrelevant extra. Marx, hardly taken -

seriously by academic economists until Joan Robinson revived him in
the early 1940s, is now widely seen as an important theoretical
economist in his own right, the last and greatest classical economist.

But there is a sturdy and growing industry of those who feel that the é
real importance of Marx lies in his role as precursor of Hitler and all :.. -
the ills of the twentieth century: racialism, anti-semitism, genocide and i`-

ut
(ui?

noe

jae

Social Darwinism. This interpretation of the ‘real’ Marx may overtake ``

and hide the Joan Robinson interpretation.?

Introduction

With Nazi Germany, it is not difficult to see its war-time policies
as the ‘real’ Nazism, and everything connected with it up to 1939, and
by extension up to 1933, as leading to that point. This interpretation
has been strengthened by its role in maintaining the validity and
necessity of immediately post-war Allied policies, and, indeed, to
justify the paradox that we fought a war to save democracy and virtue
in alliance with a power, Soviet Russia, which had already by 1939

carried out more murders, probably some twenty million, than Nazi

Germany was ever to be responsible for, and that in peace-time. Many
historians of the period had themselves played a part in shaping policy
during and after the war: some had worked in British Intelligence. But
the link between pre-Nazi and early Nazi ideas and later Nazi practice

remains a problem; it is hoped that this book, by examining Darré’s .

agrarian and eugenic policies, in concept and in practice, will
contribute to establishing the simplest of historical data, what actuallv
happened: wie es eigentlich gewesen ist.

WHY A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY?

History is made up of men and men’s actions. ‘Men make their own
history,’ and in those rare epochs where that history is created on the
basis of an idea it can be much easier to establish the clarity of an idea
than the clarity of factual data. Behind the historian’s generalisations
lies the ever-present awareness that ‘under each grave-stone a world lies
buried’; that the texture of reality is composed by a myriad of
individualities.1°

German historians tend towards a theoretical approach. National
Socialism, especially, has attracted the apparatus of conceptual
frameworks and sociological categories. Categorisation is an aggressive
act, and sociology is an aggressive science, even more than history. It is
hard to deal with individuals in this harsh and impersonal fashion,
which is why sociologists categorise people in groups. In the case of
Richard Walther Darré, Minister of Agriculture and Peasant Leader
from 1933 to 1942, we are dealing with a man who overturned many
pre-existing theories, and who seemed to have performed the
historically unacceptable. He affected the course of history by having
the particular ideas and abilities that he had, at the right place and at
the right time. A large tranche of National Socialism’s voting support
in the crucial election of 1932 came from the small farmers of the
north and north-west. The influential farmers’ leagues and Bauernvereine
were taken over by cadres organised and led by Darré. He was the

at a Shih ET

Introduction

author of two best-selling works in the late 1920s which propounded

the virtues of the peasant and the need to re-organise society through
rural corporations.!! In short, it seems worth while to trace the life
and career of one man, in order to see what deductions can be made
from this particular case to the general.

This book is the political and intellectual history of a man described
in highly coloured terms by admirers still living today as the ‘last
peasant leader’. It traces his ideas, his decision to turn to politics, the
continuity of his views till his death in 1953, his successes and his vast,
painful failure. It has wider significance because Nazi Germany was the
one country in western Europe where radical agricultural policies were

‘actually introduced, not just demanded. Darré becomes an important

figure, then, in a way that other early Nazis are not. Feder’s Social
Credit died without issue, unless one were to count Keynes, who was a
fan of Silvio Gesell, one of Feder’s inspirers.1?2 Gregor Strasser, that

- very Prussian mixture of authoritarian socialism and social élitism, lost

out to the south German influence by 1932. Feder and Strasser did not
see their ideas carried into effect: Darré did. That alone makes him
significant in the world of revolutionaries. As was said of Bakunin,
such men are necessary in the first days of the revolution, then they
have to be shot. In its slow motion essence, that is what happened to
Darré. Unexpected successes emerged from his legislation. Productivity
on small farms rose: they became more efficient and more modernised.
The demoralised farming population of Germany, especially the
economically innovative but socially conservative north-west German
farmers, recovered their self-image and confidence. But conditions
remained relatively worse than in towns, and the drift from the land
continued. Farms could not be seized by banks, but farms seized by
banks before 1933 were not returned to their owners, and the
improvement in agricultural conditions meant that farms were in any
case less likely to be foreclosed upon. Above all, urbanisation
continued. Autobahns and the many technical achievements of the
1930s stand out in our impressions of the social history of the period.
The most significant conclusion to be drawn from a study of the
results of Darré’s policies is that they failed to have the dramatic results
expected of them, and that is a conclusion that has serious implications
for planners trying to aid peasant societies today. `

In the discussion over what is and is not National Socialism,
agricultural economics is of special interest, as it is an area where there
is a clear continuity of personnel and ideas from before the First World
War to well after the Second. There are only so many ways in which

Introduction

one can evolve solutions to the problems of small peasant farmers, and
if one wants to maintain them as a class, the solutions available shrink
dramatically to the inalienability of land and the maintenance of prices.
This continuity of ideas has perhaps been obscured by the dramatic
propaganda value of the phrase ‘Blood and Soil’. This slogan, coined in
the early 1920s by a renegade Social Democrat, became virtually
identified with National Socialist ideology, to the extent that a recent
work on Nazi cinema actually called its chapter on ideology, ‘Blood

and Soil’.!? The element in this slogan that concerns the link between

people and land has been either neglected or jeered at
uncomprehendingly, as recorded above. Yet in many countries today,
including European nations such as Greece and France, and several

States in the United States of America, farm purchase by non-nationals

is either forbidden or tangled up with so many booby traps as to be
made extremely difficult. The position in the Third World is of
course much more exclusivist and racialist. Sometimes the rhetoric of
nation and race and land is open, as with Israeli settlers in Arab lands
in recent years.1* Then the urban liberal may feel a frison of
discomfort. But usually it is implicit rather than explicit. Peasants like
to keep their land. They like to live among other peasants, preferably
near enough to a town where their produce can be marketed, but far
away enough to avoid pollution by the non-kin. These qualities are
known to us: they are part of our mental furniture, part of what we
mean when we say ‘peasant’. We think it is rather cute. People have a
right to their land, to their peasantness. Sensitive observers even
understand the gut dissatisfaction felt by all food producers when they
exchange their produce for money. Market exchanges satisfy only
when value is exchanged for value; and no-one who has grown his
own produce can feel satisfied with the exchange of his goods for
money; because the produce he sells is the result of life, it contains life,
and what he receives is dead. There can be no equivalent. Hence the
conundrum that no one is more money-grubbing than the peasant, yet
no one more contemptuous of it. i

Yet peasants have another quality; they may crave continuity, but
they are also innovative. The agricultural surpluses produced by
efficient peasant technology are thought to be the basis for successful
industrialisation. This means that given the right marketing structures,
it should be possible for efficient peasant production to survive
urbanisation and co-exist with it. One agrarian historian has called this
type of producer the ‘smallholder technician of the future’.!5 The
populist, anarchist, political impulses associated with the European

Introduction

peasant may mean that he will not adapt to. the urban hierarchy
inherent in democracy; but that is not to say that he cannot survive
literacy and television. The Russian agrarian economist, Chayanov,
wrote a science-fiction novel in the dark days of 1921 in which he
envisaged prosperous peasants (kulaks, perhaps) attending concerts in
towns in their own aeroplanes, then returning to milk the cows. This
vision of the independent, prosperous, free smallholder, so prominent
in German agrarianism, is curiously similar to the English ideal of the
yeoman farmer. That great neo-Englishman, Jefferson, wanted to see
an America composed of independent gentleman farmers. Jefferson was
elected an honorary member of the Bavarian Bauernvereine (Peasant
League), of 1810. The American West provided inspiration to a
German geographer and economist, von Thiinen, who envisaged an
economy baséd on farming, with large estates divided up among
labourers, who would be able to accumulate enough capital to buy
their land after ten years work. Von Thiinen, widely attacked by
Marxist economists today as the founder of the idea of marginalism,
left his land to be divided up among his own labourers, and is claimed
by East Germany today as an early Socialist. He was an inspirer of
Herbert Backe, fervent National Socialist and Darré’s successor as
Minister of Agriculture, and also of Chayanov, the Soviet

‘agronomist.!® The point of these apparently disconnected observations

is that accepted political and social axes break down when ideas about
peasant society and production are concerned. The small farmer, the
peasant, is not just a vehicle for the townsman’s romantic or
reactionary ideas, he can be seen as the core of society itself, the most
productive, the most resourceful, the most innovative group of a
natıon.

At a time when accepted orders, ideas and structures were widely
perceived to be collapsing, the peasant in Germany offered not a return
to some golden age, but a sound, healthy starting-point to something
new. Reculer pour mieux sauter, to get rid of these existing constraints,
seemed alluring to many neo-conservative intellectuals of the 1920s.
German agricultural economics was traditionally a Volkswissenschaft: it
had a social and sociological dimension. Agrarian ideas belonged to the
pre-neo-classical tradition. The word ‘peasant’ in Germany did not
have the connotation of serfdom, or previous bondage to a landowner,
that it has in English. To give one example of the small but tangible
linguistic difference involved, hunting over peasant land with horses
was forbidden in most German states in 1848; an example of the
relative self-confidence enjoyed by the German smallholder. Part of

Introduction

this confidence was reflected in the extent to which the small farmer
was seen as the core of future agricultural productivity, and indeed,
peasant farming showed an increase in both productivity (higher for
small farms than for large farms from 1860 to 1925) and in the number
of small farms, even at a time of acute agricultural depression.

Nazi rural ideology was a fusion of several different streams of ideas
and benefited from the strength of existing rural traditions. There was

an anti-Prussian and anti-state element in peasant political behaviour. .

Small peasant producers were hostile to perceived market inadequacies
and to credit constraints. The Land Reform ideals of Henry George
found a home in German Land Reform movements of the late
nineteenth-century; they differed from Darré’s plans in proposing a
quasi-nationalisation of land through a land tax, but were similar in-the
basic ideal of the independent small farmer. Corporatist, anti-liberal
economists found it easy to understand the idea of the peasantry as a
separate Stand, as did the rather more liberal economics associated with
Nordicist circles (who believed in the inherently freedom-loving nature
of the northern Europeans).

Peasant production was in fact seen as materially superior as well as
morally superior. The peasant would work harder, know his land
better, be more economical in bought-in inputs, hand-dig his land, and
coax more from the soil. The idea that peasant farming could be
economically desirable, and lessen dependence on imported fodder and
food, naturally gave impetus to the moral arguments—that the peasant
represented ‘freedom, property thrift’: ‘frugality, loyalty, hard work’.1”
The desirable norm was the self-sufficient family farm of fifteen to
seventy-five hectares; not too small, not too big. Many of the
dignified, white-haired professors whose portraits can be seen adorning
text-books on agricultural economics became attached to Darré’s
entourage: they translated the words ‘Blood and Soil’ into a text-book
for agrarian reform, for renovation of silo buildings, a good example
of the way in which ideas change and reform as they sift through
men’s minds. l

Indeed, the typical agricultural economist who supported Darré and
the Nazis in the 1930s would have been born in 1895, son of a village
schoolmaster in a small village. He would be educated in a republican
and atheistic tradition, but would acquire a theistic, but probably anti-
confessional religious feeling in later life. He would write a doctoral
dissertation on peasant productivity, work as adviser to a farmer’s
union, and become a professor some time in the 1920s. He would visit
Soviet Russia to help negotiate seed or horse-breeding stock purchases,

Introduction

and be roped in to help the infant National Food Estate after 1933. He

would admire Darré’s support for the peasantry, and his attacks on the
large landowners and ‘Prussianism’, but consider his tendency to write
off all peasants south of Göttingen a mistake. He would weary of the
slogan ‘Blood and Soil without relinquishing support for what he
perceived Darréism to be about, be drafted into the SS advisory service

in 1939, sent to Russia to improve milk production, write memos

dissenting from German treatment of the Ukrainians in 1941, and be in
and out of concentration camps until 1945. Then he would, after de-
Nazification, take up a post again as an agrarian economist or historian
or civil servant, and go on writing articles about the importance of the
peasantry to the body politic, and praising Darré’s support for methane
gas plants and small tractors. He would support the EEC Agricultural
Policy with enthusiasm. His writings would have a curiously
unanalytical and anodyne flavour that would puzzle and irritate later
writers in Peasant Studies; caused by his inability to expound on his
reasons for supporting the peasantry in post-war Germany. He would
be utterly perplexed by liberal, free-market economics, and believe that
England’s fields had grown only thistles since the Reform Act. The
sight of the farmers of Schleswig-Holstein marching on Hamburg in
the company of anti-nuclear Greens would stir a faint echo of
memory, a sense of déjà vu. To a man who had helped pass a law in
1934 ensuring that new woodland plantings: were composed of mixed
deciduous and evergreen trees, who had seen nature reserves
established, and assumed that afforested land was sacrosanct (not only
was it not planned to cut down trees for peasant settlement but
landowners offered to swop their arable land for publicly owned forest
so that the public authorities could settle the arable land), an opinion
poll that showed that 99% of Germans had heard of the dying forests,
and that 74% of them showed great concern, would have
caused no surprise. In a sense, this work should be dedicated to this man.

At the beginning of this introduction, I stated my premise, that
Germany, in its 1930s agricultural policies, was the one European
country that instituted radical tenure and price legislation in an attempt
to solve the problems of peasant producers. Why, then, is it so often
argued that German agrarianism was the product of a romantic,
reactionary, fanatical reaction against industrialisation? After all,
between the wars, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, France, Italy, Spain and
Denmark had peasant parties and agitation for land reform, and, in the
case of the Successor States, land reform did take place, albeit at the cost
of an ethnically alien landowning class.!® Britain also had its

Introduction

smallholdings movement, and in the Edwardian era, its land reform
movement. The ideal of a kind of yeoman farmer as the basis of a
nation was widespread in British colonial plans in the 1930s. These
countries have nothing in common; they display quite different rates
of industrialisation, ranging from early and complete, to late and
impressive, to non-existent. German fears about the disappearance of
the peasantry date back to Frederick the Great, while the diminution of
the tax base in Oldenburg in the 1820s, caused by mass peasant
emigration, incited the creation of a settlement commission. Was
Frederick the Great reacting against industrialisation? Was Freiherr
vom Stein? One begins to wonder why it was that Germany went on

modernising so very slowly, over so many decades, and reacting so

much.!? The value of comparative history is that it allows these easy
clichés to be tested empirically. However, one fears that it will be some
time before the work of economic and agricultural historians like
Farquharson and Warriner creeps into the straightforward political
histories, and until that time the German desire to have a populated,
prosperous countryside, farmed with tender loving care, will be seen as
‘fanatical’, simply because it was a belief held by men who found it
possible to work with the National Socialist government in its early
years. ,

But if agrarianism was not backward-looking and primitive, what
did it seek? Can one integrate ‘naturism’ with the ‘smallholding
technician’ ideal? One answer is that Darré and his circle laid stress on
the innovative aspect of the small farm, and supported methane gas

plants, small tractors suitable for small farms, and market garden |

machinery. When a British team of agricultural experts visited
Germany after the war in search of new inventions, they were
surprised to find developments in dwarf-rooting stocks for fruit trees,
roto-tiller and spraying equipment, bulk manures based on peat and
dung, and lightweight machinery. In some areas, such as fungicides and
seed-cleaning machinery, the Germans were more advanced. These
were all innovations designed to help the small farmer, and their
success implies that if there had not been a war, Nazi Germany would
have continued to develop its agriculture along these lines.2° It was not
really as paradoxical as it seemed that German agriculture should be
developing in this way in an era of technological change. Innovation
implies the capacity to escape from old methods, the dead-weight of
large farms, large companies, banks, outworn institutions, and all the
encumbranced interest groups fighting over the economic corpse of the
1920s. Nature-based thinking tends to optimism, rather than to appeals

nn a,

Ae KEANE

Introduction

to the past. Its essence is to be ‘forward-looking’, because of its

inherent rejection of the old, the traditional. It emphasises youth, the

young, the new, and this fits in with the demographic pattern of Nazi
support in the late 1920s. When one agronomist exhorted his farmers
to go ‘Forward, onward, avoiding the old errors’, this was an
archetypal National Socialist formulation: its similarity to the
progressivist ‘onward ever upward’ slogans of twentieth-century
Britain is not accidental, because both were the product of a radical
rejection of existing structures. ,

The word ‘radical’ is not used lightly here. The naturist thinker is
always Antigone, not Creon. Nature is seen as a path which leads
somewhere; it is a teacher. One goes to the natural world to learn

from it, and returns with a series of lessons. Nature teaches that there is.

a truthful, real world, which can, though with difficulty, be seized,
grasped and verified. It exists objectively. Why is this apparently
obvious attitude a radical one? Because conservative thought is either
indifferent to this sort of realism—preferring criteria of social
usefulness—or else translates reality to a metaphysical plane where it
poses no threat to social stability. Socialists and communists believe in
structures and, once in power, in stability. At heart, they do not want
to rock the boat, they want to get in it.

But the man who goes to nature for his beliefs is rejecting these
compromises. He may be of an unanalytical cast of mind, but he
knows how to say no. He is inherently suspicious and blood y-minded.
He suspects tradition, ruling classes, and lies, even holy lies. He prefers
kin to caste. He can not, I think, be described as Utopian or mystical,
just because he does not conform. If one defines Utopianism as the
attempt to escape from ‘the Wheel’, then nature-inspired reformers are
not Utopian.?! They go to nature to learn, and return with the
recommendation that one clings to the Wheel, because it is the most
sensible path of action.

Whether or not Darré’s premise that the northern European peasant
was the most valuable and creative element in European civilisation
was true, is unprovable. It could be argued that any act of political
self-identification is irrational. Given his premise, Darré’s method of
argument and system of ideas was rational. His attempt to fulfil his
political ideas through political action rested on the assumption that the
institutions of a revolutionary state could be used to achieve
revolutionary aims. It is this assumption that now appears irrational.

Certainly, Darré’s ideology was something more than a purely
teleological policy, though; something which is not completely

Introduction

amenable to analysis in terms of polycracy, productivity or eugenics. In
reacting against what he saw as the failed, finished institutions of his
day, the cultural colonisation by western Europe and even America,
Darré was implying a cultural criticism that he was not competent
clearly to express, only to label. When Heidegger talks of the
consumption mentality as ‘the organisation of a lack’, which exists only
to fulfil the vacuum of ‘non-Being’, when he talks of ‘the world which
has become an unworld ... the desolation of the earth’, he was vividly
expressing a sense of alienation, of being lost in a vacuum of unreality,
that lay behind Darré’s thinking.?? Darré was to write before his death
that he had been a fool to think that the Nazis could have repaired the

broken link between man and soil, nature and God. But he continued |

to think that there was a tangible, real world, veiled by man’s error,
which could be reached, if only the veil could be torn aside.

The unnoticeable law of the earth preserves the earth ... in the
allotted sphere of the possible which everything follows and yet
nothing knows ... The birch tree never oversteps its possibility.
The colony of bees dwells in its possibility ... It is one thing
just to use the earth, another to receive the blessing of the earth
... in order to shepherd the mystery of Being and watch over
the inviolability of the possible.??

It is the core of my argument that one should not let the existence of
the uniforms and the swastikas interfere with the evaluation of Darré’s

attempt to ‘watch over the inviolability of the possible’. He was |

guardian of a radical, centrist, republican critique which pre-dated
National Socialism, and still lives on. That the political development
with which he and others associated themselves reversed and then
destroyed that viewpoint is an irony that will echo and re-echo many
times in this work.

CHAPTER ONE

Who was Darré? —

1896-1924

Like many National Socialist leaders Darré came from outside
Germany. Hess, Backe, Rosenberg, and, of course, Hitler, were all
born outside the frontiers of the German Reich. ‘Auslanddeutsche’ were

‘ prominent and active in German nationalist circles, whether because of

the shock of returning disappointed to a longed-for homeland, or the
outsider’s clearer perception of national ills. Not only was Darré born in
Argentina, on 14th July 1895, but he did not see Germany until he was
ten years old, when he travelled there alone to go to school. He was
the son of a director of the trading firm Engelbert Hardt & Co.,
Richard Oskar Darré (who had emigrated to Argentina in 1876), and a
half-Swedish, half-German mother, Eleanor Lagergren, daughter of a
trader, who met Richard Oskar Darré in Buenos Aires. On his father’s
side, Richard Walther Darré was descended from a Huguenot family
which had emigrated from northern France in 1680. His maternal
grandmother was the daughter of a yeoman farmer in Lower Saxony.
His maternal grandfather was a Swedish yeoman farmer, and his uncle
was Biirgermeister of Stockholm. There were four children of the
marriage: Richard-Walther, the eldest son, Carmen,’-Erich and Ilse.
The home near Buenos Aires was in the prosperous suburb of
Belgrano, a stuccoed three-story house with a formal front garden,
surrounded by trees, and a cobbled lane outside.*

Darré’s father, born in Berlin in 1854, was a typical member of the
Berlin mercantile bourgeoisie, prosperous, educated and politically
liberal. Although nineteenth-century Prussia is associated with cartels,
étatism and militarism, this was also an era when German overseas
traders and wealthy merchants were sympathetic to English
constitutionalism and laissez-faire ideals. He admired the American
educational reformer and feminist Ellen Keys, and in his memoirs,
published in Wiesbaden in 1925, criticised the Prussian reaction to the
revolutions of 1848. He had considerable contact with the English
business and farming community in Argentina and Brazil, and many
English friends. He considered a knowledge of the English language
and culture essential for any serious businessman.

Who was Darré?

Before going to South America, Darré’s father began to train as an
engineer, but switched to medicine half-way through his studies.
Before he had finished, the family was financially ruined, and he had
to leave university. The President of the Berlin Stock Exchange,
Richard von Hardt, an old friend of the family, stepped in, and he was
put through a commercial training course and sent to Brazil. He spent
several years in Brazil and Argentina. In 1888, he became a partner of
Engelbert Hardt & Co. in Buenos Aires.”

Having been forced to abandon the subject on which his heart was
set, Darré’s father became a great believer in discipline and renunciation.
He brought up his large family in this spirit, quite unsuccessfully, since

his emphasis on the gloom and misery of life was rejected by them in |

favour of a somewhat Utopian hedonism. This rejection of the father’s
sternness was partly because, as Richard Walther observed on hearing
of his father’s death, Richard Oskar Darré had not behaved ‘with that
German virtue and honour he preached’, but drank too much, and was
a womaniser. He was rumoured to have an illegitimate son, supposed
to be half-Scottish, who was brought up with the rest of the family.?

Darré attended the local German school until he was 9 years old. He
then returned to Germany, at first alone, ‘to be brought up as
German’. He lived with Professor Elisabeth Gass at Heidelberg en
pension, and finished his primary education at the local Volksschule, or
primary school. In the autumn of 1905, he began in the Oberrealschule
at Heidelberg, and remained there until 1910, when he was fifteen.

His school work at the Deutsche Schule in Belgrano had been

adequate; concentration, behaviour and all subjects received good |

marks, especially in languages. However, once at Heidelberg, his
achievement level plummeted. His French and English remained good,
but his German and history came in for heavy criticism. For the first
year he was in the bottom three of his class of about thirty-seven.
After that period his marks fluctuated to such an extent that no pattern
can be deduced. Where he excelled in one term he failed in the next.
He seemed dreamy, well-behaved, and lacking in concentration. How
much of this was due to differences in teaching methods between
Argentina and Germany, or how much due to Darré’s own attitudes, is
hard to determine, but the change of eductional methods and schools
may have affected his reaction to his schooling, since when he left
Argentina his marks for French, Spanish and German, for behaviour
and effort, were ‘good’. while the school at Heidelberg complained of
his lack of diligence and an ‘unsuitable manner’. After five years his
marks and class position were still low. At the Evangelical School at

Who was Darré?

Gummersbach, his marks quickly improved, with geography his best
subject. Darré lost a year through his change of schools. His father was
anxious that his son should learn something of the English language
and way of life, and in 1911 he was sent as an exchange pupil to
King’s College School, Wimbledon. He had a gifted science teacher
there, who seems to have had a considerable effect on him. He left
King’s convinced of the superiority of the English public school system
to the more regimented German system, and with a fascination for
English: customs and political life. Another change followed in 1912,
when he attended the Oberrealschule at Gummersbach for two years.
His Abitur or university entrance examination was delayed by his
changes of schools, and was now due to be taken in the Autumn of
1914. The war, of course, intervened.

By the time he had left Gummersbach, his marks had improved,
but it was clear that he was not suitable for an academic career, or for
one of the professions. He was fond of open-air life. The vacations and
the weekends were spent in excursions with his brothers and sisters, or
with his school-friends. Outside school, however, he read widely and
enthusiastically.

In Easter 1914, he attended the German Colonial School at
Witzenhausen, south of Göttingen. Founded in 1898, in a large country
house called Williamshof, in imitation of the English Colonial College
and its training farms, it was designed to prepare future plantation
administrators and farmers for the specialised conditions they would
find abroad, and concentrated on practical farming, which was carried
out on the 285 hectares of farm and market garden land owned by the
school. Witzenhausen echoed Darré’s earlier brief experience of English
education’ at King’s; the students were a self-governing body, carrying
the aroma of the English prefect system. This system of self-
government by student committees was held up by Darré in his later
works as a model of education, because the system was less hierarchical
than the normal Prussian one. Graduates of the school were awarded a
diploma in colonial agriculture. It was an unlucky choice, since, after
the war, this professional qualification was to prove inadequate in
conditions of extreme unemployment, especially among the educated
middle classes; while the loss of Germany’s former colonies made the
specialised nature of the training virtually useless."

During this period, Darré felt torn between the idea of returning to
South America to farm, or becoming a soldier. When war broke out
in August 1914, he volunteered at once for the German Army, joining

Who was Darre?

the Field Artillery Regiment no. 27 (Nassau) at Wiesbaden. He had
spent one term only at Witzenhausen. Darre’s 1933 biographer reports
that of the hundred pupils who had enrolled in Easter 1914 with Darré,
only ten would return after the war, and of the others, thirty were
killed, and another thirty were too badly wounded to contemplate a
farming career. The fact that he had volunteered remained a source of
pride all his life: the point was that Darré was still of Argentinian
nationality, and could easily have avoided the war.® He continued to
have dual Argentinian-German nationality until 1933, when he becamie
a minister; the Argentinian nationality then lapsed.

His wartime career was steady rather than spectacular. He served in
two artillery regiments, both of which were virtually wiped out. He
was wounded twice. In autumn 1916, in the Battle of the Somme, he
received the Iron Cross, Second Class, and was sent on an artillery
training course in January 1917. He was then promoted to reserve
lieutenant. In July 1917, two shell splinters lodged in his left leg, and
he was caught in a gas attack. He was then given a short home leave.
He returned to the battles of Verdun and Champagne, and the last
push by the German forces into France in March 1918. In April 1918,
he was transferred to the Field Artillery Regiment von Scharnhorst, 1st
Hannoverian no. 10, and fought with them until October 1918, when
he contracted a fever, and was sent to a base hospital. Some weeks later
Darré emerged to find that Germany had surrendered. His diary notes:

One could see that politically speaking everything was in the
air; but the total collapse of Germany was unexpected. The
maddest rumours were everywhere. I myself was relieved from
duty because of illness ... I looked for wounded comrades and
in general completely disregarded politics.”

Darré and his fellow-soldiers suddenly heard the news from Kiel of
the German naval mutiny and the election of a Worker’s and Seaman’s
Council. On 7th and 8th November, 1918, his diary described how he
saw ‘Bolshevik agents’ persuading soldiers to give up their arms and
join the uprising. A soldier’s council was elected at his barracks, Darré
and two other officers remaining to negotiate terms with the
representatives of the Social Democrats. Darré’s family were living in
French-occupied Wiesbaden. As soon as he had returned to his studies
and was away from Wiesbaden, he joined a Freikorps regiment, the
Hanover Freiwilligen (volunteer) unit.®

Darré’s father was proud of his son’s wartime record. The family

mE oe oo tne à
A rg

Who was Darre?

had produced doctors and soldiers in equal numbers for several

generations. He even published a compilation of Darré’s letters home -
from the front, and of his war-time diaries.? However, Darré himself
did not dwell on his wartime experiences, apart from writing articles
on field artillery tactics in 1923 and ’24. He joined the Stahlhelm, the
German nationalist veteran’s association, in 1922, while studying at
Halle, and remained a paid-up member until 1927.10 His health was
probably permanently weakened by his war years. Between 1919 and
1923 he was under a course of homeopathic treatment for heart trouble
and various nervous disorders. His.regiment, the von Scharnhorst, had
taken part in thirty battles between 1914 and 1918, and Darré’s record

. shows that his personal participation in the war probably included as

many engagements, in a fighting capacity.!!

Although after the First World War Darré’s father mourned ‘all the
inspiration, the joy, willingness of self-sacrifice, all hopes of victory,
and happy future of the fatherland come to naught’; nonetheless, he
retained at first much of his earlier liberal and pro-English spirit.12 His
attitude was more moderate than some of the typically civilian
attitudes of the war years, expressed in such matters as a hostility to the
English: and French language, and attempts to replace foreign loan
words with German root words. Fines were levied on those who used
French, English, Italian or Russian words.13 His attitude hardened after
the First World War, when the family, now settled in Wiesbaden,
found themselves in the French zone of occupation. Letters were
censored, a pass was needed to move in or out of the zone, and
currency restrictions were in force. Most of the family’s substantial
funds were lost in the inflation of 1923, while the increasing
nationalism and militancy of the Argentinian government meant that
problems arose remitting funds from Darré’s old company in Buenos
Aires. Darré’s father wrote regularly to his son, and the two exchanged
political analyses as frankly as they could, although occasionally the
elder Darré would observe that censorship had interfered with a letter.
In late 1923 they agreed that it would be safer not to discuss politics
any more in their correspondence.!4

The trauma of Germany’s defeat in 1918 was followed by a series
of defeats at the Conference of Versailles. By the time the Allied
Powers had satisfied the territorial claims of the new states, more
territory and resources had been taken from Germany than anyone had
intended. Reparations were set at an unrealistically high level. Feelings
in Germany ran highest in Upper Silesia, where a state of near-civil
war existed between Germans and Poles, and in the Rhineland, where

Who was Darré?

the French maintained an armed presence. The returning soldiers
blamed the civilians, and especially the politicians at home for the
defeat. This was partly because the defeat had been unexpected for
many. The war in the east had apparently ended with victory. Under
the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed in March 1918, the new Bolshevik
government had made peace with Germany, and had ceded
considerable territory to her, including former Russian Poland, the
Baltic States and the Ukraine. Massive settlements were planned in the
Baltic lands for some 250,000 German farmers. After the Armistice of
November 1918, the army considered continuing the war in the east,
the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk having been revoked by Russia, but

rejected it as impractical. Not only was this newly won territory given

up, but land which had been under German rule and occupation for
many centuries. East Prussia lost its hinterland; Danzig, a major trading
post, was cut off from the rest of Germany. Many retuming soldiers
blamed the new Social Democrat government for the defeat, as much
as or more than they blamed the revolutionary militants of 1918-19.
‘We only lost the war, but the peace has been lost by others’, was the
accusation from a returning soldier in Erich Dwinger’s war trilogy,
Wir Rufen Deutschland. An ex-comrade from Darré’s battery wrote to
him in May 1920 that he had thought the reports of disaster and defeat
in the French Press exaggerated, but after release from a French POW
camp to Germany, ‘we found how true it was’.15

The new democratic constitution signed at Weimar was unpopular
with the Communists, with the conservatives, with broad middle-class

opinion, and with the nationalist ‘fatherland’ movement. Furthermore,

democracy was seen as alien to German political traditions. For the
second time in 120 years, it had been brought in as a result of armed
defeat, and was seen by many as being an essentially alien imposition; a
concomitant of defeat. In the election, no one party gained a majority,
and the Social Democrats had to govern in a coalition. The peace
treaties had been signed only after painful consideration, especially the
clauses accepting war guilt. Another potential source of opposition in
the early 1920s lay in the ex-soldier himself. The army had at first
refused to sign the treaties, and in late 1918 a league of ex-servicemen
was formed, the Stahlhelm Bund der Frontsoldaten. At first a ‘harmless
group of old veterans’, as early as 1919 it was active and vocal, and
formed branches all over Germany, opposing both democracy and the
‘System’, as the new constitution was called. Its stance was conservative
and nationalist.1© The Freikorps was formed at the same time,
consisting of ex-combat units and new volunteers, many of them too

Pa me

Who was Darre?

young to have fought in the war, and eager now to serve. It was

originally called into being by the new Republic to prevent armed
revolutionary Communists overthrowing the government. The first
recruitment notice, signed by Noske of the Central Council, also .
appealed to the units to defend German borders, property and people
against Poles and Czechs. The Freikorps units fought in the east in an
attempt to maintain territorial gains in the Baltic; failed, then moved
to the German-Polish border, where Polish nationalists were trying to
expel German villagers from plebiscite areas. After the plebiscite,
which was favourable to Germany, the Poles launched an attack on the
disputed area. Some three-quarters of a million Germans were to be
effectively expelled in the 1920s by Poland; their farms expropriated
and ‘compensation’ paid in near-worthless government scrip. t7

In early 1919, the militant Marxists, rejected by the vote of the
Congress of Worker’s and Soldier’s Councils, staged an uprising, the
Spartacist revolt. The Social Democrats used the Freikorps to put down
the uprising. These units went on to break the power of the Councils.
When in 1921 the Weimar Government began to put into effect
Versailles clauses reducing the army to 100,000 men, two navy units
under a Captain Erhardt led a putsch in Berlin. They declared a new
government under Wolfgang Kapp, a civil servant, and General von
Littwitz. After a few days the putsch faded away and Erhardt was
imprisoned. *® l :

The violence continued throughout Germany. Marches and
counter-marches, demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, left
hundreds dead on Right and Left in the first few'.years of the
Republic. Each political party, the SPD, the KPD and so on, had its
own storm-troopers.

In January 1923, France and Belgium invaded the Ruhr in an
attempt to force the payment of reparations. The German currency,
already weakened, collapsed. By October 1923, trillion mark notes
were being issued. That year saw a peak of nationalist feeling and
bitterness, while Golo Mann considers that anti-semitism was at its
height just after the First World War.t° Separatist movements grew in
Bavaria and elsewhere. The re-unification of Germany was only thirty
to fifty years old, and regional sentiments were strong. In the Ruhr the
French backed à separatist group which instigated an armed
insurrection. Hitler’s November putsch was a by-product of all these
circumstances. Propaganda harking back to the French occupation
played a dominant role in the next twenty-five years.

Like many others, Darré found it hard to endure the period

Who was Darre?

immediately after the war. He attended a business school to learn
book-keeping and shorthand, but felt ill at ease at home. His diary
reveals resentment at the French street names and the presence of
French soldiers. He missed the company of people of his own age and
the comradeship of the army. Eventually, he decided to go back to the
German Colonial School, and resume his agricultural training. There
were many new: applicants to the school, but a place was found for
Darré because of his war record.?°

By January 1919 he had met his future first wife, Alma Stadt, in
Goslar, where she was at school with his younger sister, Ilse. He
confided to his diary that as soon as he met her, he had an instinct that

she would be his future wife.2! Alma became the friend he longed for. `

He wrote to her several times a week, and expressed to her his sense of
inner weakness. ‘Look here—I will be absolutely honest with you,’ he
wrote in October 1919. ‘My own idleness causes problems. Life has
tossed me about so much already, has played so many dirty tricks on
me. I’ve become mistrustful. Not only against fate, but of myself. I've
experienced too often how I can become weaker and weaker ... I need
a source of strength to lean on’.?? Alma was not to be that source, and
indeed Darré remained a solitary and mistrustful man, craving
comradeship, but receiving instead either hero-worship or
bewilderment from his peers. His letters to his wife over the next ten
years oscillated between displays of affection and violent reproaches.
He leaned on her, but resented what he saw as her stronger character.

The tone of his communications shows a hectoring uncertainty: the

need to teach and inform, but a fear of failure.

If one were to postulate a reaction against a stern father, who
stressed the need for hard work, discipline and orderly business habits,
one might expect to find a picture similar to the 1920s liberalism of
England, after the Victorian sunset. Darré did in fact show many of
these characteristics. His reaction led him to radical and revolutionary
ideas, which, based on the humanism and republicanism of the
Darwinian tradition, merged with the love of nature and the physical
world inspired in late 19th-century Germany by Bölsche, author of
Love-Life in Nature. He followed the cult of physical fitness. As early as
1905 the ten-year old schoolboy was winning prizes for swimming,
and keeping a record of his achievements. He participated in running
and swimming races at Giessen University in 1926, and sent. the
newspaper reports of his triumphs to his wife. He wrote to her about
the virtues of the naked body. People resented nakedness, he argued,

Who was Darré?

because the naked body expressed the truth of the inner person. You

could not hide behind clothes.??

Darré tried to inspire Alma with his own enthusiasm for the
cultivation and Iove of the body. He exhorted her to do gymnastics,
and sent her a card by Fidus (Hugo Höppener), the Jugendstil illustrator,
showing a naked.man ecstatically greeting the sunrise on a mountain,
his hair streaming in the wind. Their courtship remained platonic,
though Darré wrote candidly to Alma, ‘Physical love should be
cultivated because it produces a certain release of energy (Entspannung
der Energy) ... In nearly all marriages the key to unharmonious
relationships is to be found in ignorance of these facts.’?* The
engagement between the two was kept secret for a year.?5

However, as they were contemplating marriage plans, Darré
suddenly had to leave Witzenhausen. A brief letter arrived for his
father, on 27th November 1920, announcing that the student Court of
Honour had found Darré guilty of lying. ‘Some months ago I told a lie
to protect the reputation of a comrade’, wrote Darré. ‘I have now been
held guilty by the Court’.2© The judgment meant automatic expulsion.
There were no recriminations. The family flew to his defence, and a
compaign began to have his name cleared of the offence. Although
Darré’s 1933 biography mentioned that he had taken his
'Kolondiplomlandwirt at Witzenhausen, he was not in fact able to take his
final diploma at the time. He was also expelled from the regimental
union of his old regiment, which hit him particularly hard. Vigorous
support from the teachers at Witzenhausen ensured that the verdict was
quashed, but it took nine years, and it was not until May. 1930 that he
was awarded his diploma. However, the affair seems to have aroused a
competitive spirit in his academic work and attitude to life in general
that had been lacking before. He went to Halle-Wittenburg in 1922,
and despite distractions from politics, his marriage, also of 1922, and
the hyper-inflation, ended by producing a good degree.?7

Immediately after the war, he was still contemplating emigrating as
a farmer to Argentina but was discouraged by the high price of land.
The immediate aftermath of the First World War was a continuation
of farm support prices and high land prices in Germany, fuelled by the
incipient inflation, while South America enjoyed a boom from the
world-wide shortage of food. Darré found that he would have to work
for at least ten years as a labourer or gaucho before he could afford a
farm of his own. ‘It is a very healthy life’, wrote his father doubtfully,
‘but the work is extremely hard’. His heart problems, he pointed out,
were hardly compatible with the brutally hard work necessary for a

Who was Darre?

settler in South America. In January 1922, Darré contacted an
Argentinian friend again, with a view to emigration, but received a
discouraging reply. His last enquiry about Argentina was in 1923.28

But his next step after leaving Witzenhausen was to work as an
unpaid farm assistant to gain practical experience. He began as a pupil
on a peasant farm in Upper Bavaria; but the farm was sold after three
months, and the new owner did not want him. Darré then worked as
an assistant milker on a farm near Baden. Three months later there was
a vacancy for an apprenticeship as farm manager in Gut Aumiihle,
Oldenburg, starting July 1921. Darré enjoyed working with animals—
he had asked his father if he could run a stud-farm in 1917.

Darré found his experience of farm pupillage in Pomerania —

surprisingly rewarding. He decided to find a smallholding which
would support his wife and himself, and his father-in-law offered to
help finance him. He wrote to private and public land agencies looking
for a small farm, but they were either unavailable, or offered at a
prohibitive price. In some cases more than a million marks were being
asked for part-shares in run down farms. In December 1921, Gut
Aumühle changed hands, and the new owner brought in an old army
friend, with no experience of farming, to take Darré’s place. At this
point, he began to make bitter references to the treatment of old
soldiers in Germany, and the loss of German territory in the East. He
noted that Admiral Horthy in Hungary had given his veterans land,
and complained that the German plans to distribute farms to soldiers in
the east in 1918, had come to nothing. In his second book, Neuadel, he
was to stress the Horthy experiment.??

Darré’s family had all been affected by the political and economic

disasters. His aunt was now penniless, and decided to train as a teacher.
His father seemed bewildered at the speed at which his prosperous,
newly united country had lost, not only its colonies, but German
territory. The German Colonial School had circularised its pupils’
parents in late 1918, warning that economic recovery would be
impossible without access to raw materials. The family funds were tied
up in South America, though friends helped to smuggle some money
to him. Darré’s younger sister, Ilse, sent him a card in 1920 which
showed a bearded peasant and his young son gazing across a wide river
into storm clouds, while the peasant pointed out ‘the Fatherland’.?®

In 1922, Darré moved to Halle, to study for an agricultural degree
at the Friedrich-Witte University, Halle. Here, he found a pleasant flat
with a garden. He was constantly in debt, and Alma took over his
financial affairs with his approval, and wrote to his father on money

Who was Darré?

matters. He found his dependence on his father embarrassing, and
wrote a long letter explaining that the war was responsible for his
delayed professional training. His studies at Witzenhausen now
appeared to be useless, since he could not use them as credits towards a
degree in Halle. In Germany, unlike England, terms spent at one
university can normally be set towards degree requirements at another.
His younger brother, Erich was studying for a doctorate at Marburg.
Like Darré, he was inspired by H.S. Chamberlain’s work, and wrote,
‘If I had time, I would like to busy myself with theories of inheritance
and the racial question’.!

His half-brother was small and dark, a contrast to the four tall,
fair-haired children. His successor’s widow speculated that this may
have helped to stimulate Darré’s interest in racial questions. When his
sister Carmen had her first child, Darré mused on the quantity of black
hair the child was born with; it would soon go and be replaced by

light-brown hair, which had happened with them all. Certainly, there

was no black hair in the family, he pointed out. He seemed to have
acquired an interest in medical matters from his father, who followed
the latest scientific discoveries in biology, and recommended works on
physiology and heredity when his son began his farm pupillage in
1921. When he began to study animal breeding, as part of his
agricultural degree at Halle, his father again sent him book lists, and
discussed “Darwin and Haeckel’s theory of evolution’ with him.?2

The collapse of his earlier plans left Darr& in limbo. He spent much
of his spare time reading a range of authors, from the great German
classics to best-selling historical novels devoted to past German heroes
who had struggled to conquer what was now lost. Darré read the
classical vélkisch authors, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Langbehn and
Lagarde. He also acquired a thorough grounding in German literature,
treading Goethe, Schiller and Walter von der Vogelweide. Though
never academically brilliant, he seems to have acquired a good general
knowledge of German culture, specialised as his own training was. One
letter home jokingly quoted a lament from von der Vogelweide when
his money failed to arrive, another, criticising an attack on
Protestantism by Count Keyserling, discussed Rousseau, Brentano,
Eichendorf and others at some length; he was obviously well
acquainted with the broad outlines of European ideas. Later he studied
Sorokin, the sociologist, and read Nietzsche. He admired the ballads of
Borries von Munchhausen, especially those dealing with the peasant
soldiers of the eighteenth century. He read Wanderjahr of an Engineer,
by Max Eyth, one of the nineteenth-century founders of the German

Who was Darre?

Agricultural Society, and novels about colonial adventures and

farming. His reading of Lagarde’s Deutsche Schriften and Lagarde’s
biography led him to criticise German education bitterly. He thought
there had been a decline of general knowledge since the 1860s. ‘How
horribly empty today’s education is.’ He criticised the ‘humanistic
schools’ for not teaching Latin, ‘a sound foundation for other
languages’. English should certainly be taught ‘because of the USA ...

though Yankee English is not exactly classical English ... Spanish is as

important today’.??

His best work at Halle was in studies on animal breeding. This was
carried out under a Professor Frölich, who was and remained a
supporter of: Darré and his ideas. He was later to suggest his name to
the Nordic Ring, together with three other Professors who had taught
him at Halle, as possible sympathisers. With the compulsory courses on
agricultural subjects (which included meteorological observation, plant
breeding, geology and chemistry), Halle offered courses on ‘Racial
Hygiene; its Possibility and Aims’ (lectures given by Dr Drigalski, ex-
army officer and member of the Society for Racial Hygiene), Social
Policy, Economic Policy, the Versailles Peace Treaties, Plato, Ancient
and Moder Philosophy, Hegel’s Social Philosophy, Psychology and
Medieval German Constitutional History. Mineralogy, plate tectonics
and other physical sciences were also optional. Because of his studies at
Witzenhausen, Darré was excused optional courses, but the range
available is interesting. Just before his final exams, he sold an article,
‘Animal Migrations; a clue to the Aryan Homeland’, for 22.50Mk.?*

After he had taken his farming degree at Halle, he spent a post-
graduate term at the University of Giessen working on animal
breeding with Professor Kramer, another academic with interests in
eugenics and heredity. He was offered a post as administrator of a
German farm settlement in South-West Africa; but he had decided that
his future lay in Germany, and became more and more interested in
nationalist politics. He now (1926) wrote his first influential political
article, ‘Internal Colonisation’, which attacked ‘dreams of empire’, not
only because Germany was unlikely to regain her lost colonies, but
because he saw empire as inimical and destructive to the concept of the
German homeland.??

He kept in touch with those of his former comrades and fellow
pupils who did emigrate. This may have helped him to escape the
desperate insularity and Eurocentricity of many other Nazi leaders.
Later friends commented that he seemed more aware of the non-
German world. One friend wrote from Mexico, ‘Today I am a trader,

Who was Darré?

and I have no idea what I will be doing tomorrow. In Germany

people who change their professions are despised. In America, that
attitude is unknown ... If you don’t, you would be laughed at as
stupid. In this respect at least American education is valuable.’36

It was rash of Darré to turn down the post in South-West Africa.
By 1925 he had a farming diploma from Halle, but a doctorate was
virtually essential to join even the Civil Service. His more highly
qualified friends were now taking unpaid apprenticeships on farms
while waiting for some public position to become available. With
50,000 agricultural civil servants already out of work, he found himself
practically unemployable. The Wilhelmine bonanza for the civil service
had come to an end. The Prussian Ministry .of Agriculture refused to
accept his practical farm work of 1921, and he thus failed to qualify for
an appointment in the Ministry or even the County Agriculture Office.
Now thirty-one years old, married and with a child, and without
prospects, he had never lived with his wife for longer than a vacation,
and the marriage already showed signs of strain.

When he was about to leave his first wife, in 1927, his younger
sister reproached him with having become exactly like their father in
his unfeeling egotism towards women.?” The endless and nagging
sense of duty imposed on the younger Darré by the elder produced a

chronic sense of weakness and inadequacy in the younger man. The

fact that his studies were prolonged unnaturally—long even by
German standards—and that he was kept by his father and father-in-
law for a decade, produced further defensiveness and resentment. His
ideals were of manliness, honour and strength. In 1911 and in 1919 he

- had dreamed of being a soldier. Yet he found himself obliged to

present his father with an account of his ‘achievements’ at the age of
twenty-nine, and had no economic independence until the age of
thirty-three. In 1919, when Darré was twenty-four years old, and after
four years on the Western Front, his father wrote to reproach him for
spending money on dancing lessons.?® In later years Darré reacted by
combining manic punctiliousness and military correctness in public life
with personal charm and sensitivity in private life. Those who became

. his friends, especially many of his women friends, remained faithful for

decades. In his political activity, his insecurity and self-doubt revealed
itself in an almost.obsessive cunning, plotting endlessly in the jungle
around him, while he remained able to take unpopular long-term
views on economics and politics with a visionary flair which was
alien—and unwelcome—to those around him.

In December 1918, Darré’s Argentinian pass, signed by the

Who was Darre?

Argentinian Vice-Consul at Wiesbaden, had shown a bony, oval face,
with large blue-grey eyes, cropped fair hair, gaunt marks around the
eyes and nose, and a full mouth pressed firmly together. By 1925, the
sombre expression had disappeared, and his face had begun to take on
the slightly fuller appearance it was to retain all his life.?°

1925-1929
After his written exam at Halle in February 1925, Darré worked for a

further term as ‘Voluntary Assistant’ under Professor Frölich until June
1925, when he took his oral examination. This was marked ‘very

good’, and he thought of working on a doctorate at Giessen. During | -

his semester at Giessen, in 1925-6, he again specialised in animal
breeding, this time with Professor Kramer.*°

Between 1925 and 1927, Darré published fourteen articles on animal
and plant breeding, including works on the origins of the Finnish
sheep, and seed breeding exchanges between East Prussia and the
Baltic. This subject obviously pulled together many of his diverse
interests, and, despite his late academic start, his work seemed to show
promise. He hoped, indeed, to publish his Giessen work but failed. **

In June 1926 he was offered a post in East Prussia, as organiser and
representative for the East Prussian Warm Blood Society— Trakhener
Stud. The work was unpaid, but Darr would receive travelling
expenses, and a visit to Finland was offered, to help organise a fair for
the East Prussian Chamber of Agriculture. He was interested in the

idea of working in the east. The practical and organisational work’

looked attractive, and he planned to work on a doctorate in his spare
time. By now, he was thinking of supporting himself through
journalism, as his first two political articles, ‘Innere Kolonisation’ and
‘Rathenau’ had been published, (although for a pittance: fifteen and
twenty marks respectively) but the prospect of immediate involvement
with a cause seemed attractive. The four years of war, his delayed
studies, the disaster of Witzenhausen, meant that while he craved for
and needed responsibility, he had no field of action. He had been a
romantic, a lover of the outside life. Plans for colonial adventures had
dribbled away through a mixture of ill-health, dilettantism and
uncertainty. He was a comrade who could not trust his friends,
suspicious and quarrelsome. He had striven to be a conscientious son to
a father always suspecting him of dilettante attitudes, and failed, but
now of his own accord began to look for involvement in practical

Who was Darre?

affairs. From being disorganised and thoughtless, he became punctilious
and methodical. From resenting control and discipline, he began to
demand them from himself as well as those around him. Ambitions
aroused, he believed his old faults were conquered, and his energies
ready for use. If the East Prussian Studbook Society for Warm-
Blooded Trakhener Horses wanted his services, he would throw
himself into serving their interests, especially if he could combine that
with serving Germany.

The story behind Darré’s six months in the Baltic is hard to
disentangle. The various biographical notices in the Deutsche Führer
Lexicon, the Neue Deutsche Biographie and his 1933 biography all
disagree with each other. His personal files show that he spent much of
the time investigating an intrigue on the part of the commission house
dealing with the Russians who were interested in buying the
Trakhener horses with Prussian credits. Before discussing the
possibilities behind his stay, it might be as well to explain the terms
‘Warm Blood’ and ‘Trakhener’.

In the world of horse-breeding, there are cold-blooded horses,
warm-blooded horses and thoroughbreds. Cold-blooded horses are for
heavy work, warm-blooded horses can be used for riding. The famous
warm-blooded breed of East Prussia was from the Trakhener stud,

‘whose symbol was a double antler. It was a small, tough animal, with

some English thoroughbred mixture. It was strong enough to work as
a farm horse, but excellent as a cavalry animal. It was the fighting
horse par excellence. In the 1920s, the Trakhener Stud sold thousands of
brood mares and stallions abroad. Among the interested purchasers was
the Soviet Government. The Weimar Republic, in 1922, had signed the
Treaty of Rapallo, which agreed certain peace terms and trade agree-
ments between Germany and Russia, while on 12th October 1925,
the German-Soviet Trade Treaty was signed. These Treaties aroused
violent opposition among the right-wing end of the nationalist spectrum
(while the National Bolsheviks, together with figures like von Seeckt
and General Schleicher, supported links with Russia as geo-politically in-
evitable). Under the Versailles Treaty, serious restrictions had been
placed on Germany’s diplomatic representation abroad. Because of
this, Prussian ministries were known to use apparently innocuous agents
and company representatives abroad as undercover negotiators and
collectors of information—in short, as spies. The Prussian Ministry
of Agriculture was noted for its tendency to lend itself to this practice.

Economic factors were involved, too. There was a surplus of grain
products, and prices were low. Prussia was anxious to arrange

Who was Darre?

exchanges of grain with other countries, and Russia, with her shortage
of foreign currency, was the obvious choice for a barter agreement. *?

The Trakhener stud sold some 5,000 horses to Russia during the
1920s, and the horses were paid for by Prussian government credits.
Darré suspected the deal. He spent much of his time in Insterburg,
where he was based from June 1926 on, in investigating what he
thought was a corrupt situation, and sending nine-page long reports to
his two immediate superiors. He received little response, but managed
to annoy his employers by complaining at the lack of proper
bloodlines for Hanoverian horses. He was later to compare the need to
breed back to a pure Nordic strain to the need to breed Hanoverian
horses back to a purer stock.4? Darré also reported back on the bad
economic situation for farmers in Finland, and the drought. It is hard
now to establish whether or not the commission house was spying or
cheating. Darré seems to have feared that Russia would pay for the
horses by dumping agricultural goods in Prussia, to the detriment of
the farmers. He was certainly present at negotiations with the Russians,
and complained of dumping plans, and the incident reveals Darré’s
refusal to co-operate with established authority for the sake of his
career. This attitude was not a helpful one in what was still a grace-
and-favour society. When given an official ministry post two years
later, he was besieged by requests to find posts for friends or their
relatives. His situation was not helped by the fact that the Trakhener
breed had always aroused unusual passions and loyalties: many of their
owners were as combative as their horses.**

There is some evidence for the theory that Darré had an undercover
role in the Baltic. In a letter to his wife in November 1926, he
describes how he had gone to Finland to organise a fair for the East
Prussian Chamber of Agriculture. Commercially, the fair had been a
failure, although his organisation had been competent enough. The
economic situation among Finnish and German farmers was too poor
to persuade them to attend such an event. But, he added, he had had ‘a
special mission’, which was ‘a complete success’, namely, to gather
together Finnish and East Prussian farmers, with a view to forming an
economic and cultural front, ‘especially against Russia’ .4°

Was this on behalf of the Prussian Agricultural Ministry or had it
been on his own initiative? Darré had been appalled at the poverty and
misery among East Prussian farmers, especially the new settlers, most
of whom had been agricultural labourers, and ran under-capitalised
holdings, and was quite capable of trying to organise a nationalist
resistance among East Prussian farmers on his own account. But in

Who was Darré?

February 1927 he told his wife that he was the ‘German secret
negotiator, to fight on economic matters between the Baltic and East `
Prussian Agriculture’, which suggests that he was one of the
undercover agents mentioned earlier.*°

In 1927, Darré went to Lahsis, in Finland, as representative of the
Agricultural Animal Breeding Association, and was asked to study the
organisation of small dairy farmers in East Finland at the same time,
after a report by a friend and supporter, Professor Carl Metzger,
agricultural representative at the German Embassy in Helsinki, was sent
to the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture.

In May 1927, he sent a despairing letter to Metzger, asking him to
help find him a permanent post in the Baltic. He referred to his
dependence on his father, and added. ‘It may seem funny, but this is a
very serious time for me, and I can’t even afford clothes ... If I could
go to Finland officially, then it would give me an inside position, and
much greater scope ... This is the psychological moment for me.’ A
few days later, he heard that six new consular posts had been created,
and in August 1927, he applied for a post as expert agricultural adviser
and representative for the Baltic on behalf of the East Prussian Ministry
of Agriculture. He was officially appointed in May, 1928, after months
of knocking on doors in Berlin.*7

Among others, he contacted Dr von Lésch, president of the German
Schutzbundes, on the advice of Dr Edgar Jung, who told Darré that Lésch
had ‘great influence in the Foreign Office’. His plans for supporting
East Prussian agriculture in the Baltic through barter agreements was
laid before the President of the German Chamber of Agriculture,
Brandes, by von Behr, who confided in Darré that Brandes was wholly
in agreement with them. This was an important backer, as he headed
the umbrella organisation of all German agricultural chambers. Darré
acquired considerable knowledge of the highly organised structure of
German agriculture during this period. For one year, indeed, he was a
member of eight separate agricultural and eugenic organisations. 48

In the summer of 1928 he was sent to Riga as representative of the
East Prussian Agricultural Chamber. The intervening year was spent
with his parents in Wiesbaden, where he wrote his first book Das
Bauerntum als Lebensquell der nordischen Rasse (The Peasantry as Life-
Source ofthe Nordic Race).

His years in the Baltic and the visits to Finland confirmed Darré’s
liking for the north German, and his view of them as a deeply rural
people, threatened by internal decay and external threat. He referred in
November 1926 to what he saw as his special role.

Who was Darré?

It does look to me ... as if my life’s fate will be bound with
Fast Prussia, as if God had called me to fight for East
Germanness. I suspect that here in the East I might one day
fulfil my life’s mission, but we can only wait and see.

He was so absorbed in his work that in February 1929 he refused
to return to Wiesbaden, in response to a telegram that his father was
seriously ill. ‘l can’t leave the important negotiations with the Latvian
Government,’ he telegraphed back. Three days later his father died.
Darré’s comment was, ‘When I think of the miseries of my father’s
marriage, my own reproaches are strangled.’4?

His service in the Baltic ended with an argument with the ministry

officials in Berlin over seed-breeding exchanges between Finland and `

East Prussia. He claimed the quality of the seed was poor. The matter
was taken up in Berlin, where a court hearing found that Darré was
right. However, he had aroused such animosity that he was recalled to
Königsberg in June 1929 and waited some months for a new post to be
found for him. He expected the national Ministry of Agriculture to
take over his post, and offer him a new posting in January 1930.
However, he had clearly lost favour. He claimed in his interrogation in
1947 that the political implications of Das Bauerntum led the Berlin
ministry to refuse him service in Fast Prussia, and offer him a post in
Ecuador instead but his 1933 biographer states that Darré resigned after
Stresemann refused to accept proposals on agricultural trade between
East Prussia and the Baltic States. This is possible, though there is no
supporting evidence. In December 1929, he resigned his position. Later,
wild rumours were to fly round the coffee-houses of Berlin that Darré
had been sacked for illegal deals concerning Polish rye, that he was
being blackmailed by a German industrialist who supported Darré as
Hugenberg’s successor. There seems to be no proof to support these
rumours, which were retailed in the memoirs of a KPD man who
worked for the NSDAP in the early 1930s; but their existence and
propagation hints at the controversy and resentment 'that were to
surround Darré in his political career.5° He was later able to win
support from the small, self-made businessman, who, like himself, was
an outsider in Germany’s complex interest group structure. Insofar as
this was understood by organisation men of the right and of the left, it
aroused resentment.

During these years, he began to show an ability to fire others with
enthusiasm, to organise and to administer. He also continued to quarrel

Who was Darré?

with most of his superiors, while managing to attract vigorous support
from some. In general, Darré was capable of clear-headed, sometimes `
cynical, sometimes original, radical and persuasive insights. However,
he was chronically suspicious of his confréres. This lends a sad and
ironic flavour to his emphasis on the virtues of the English public-
school spirit. At this stage in his life, these quarrels reflected not so
much his combative nature as the mediocrity entrenched in German
provincial administration.

POLITICS AND ANGER 1923-1926

In Spring 1925 the President of the Republic, Friedrich Ebert, died.

Hindenburg, the 78-year-old head of the German armed forces during
the First World War, was a candidate for the presidency, and was
elected with a million-vote majority against a Communist and a
centrist candidate, after the first election produced a stalemate. The
election, like the revolution of 1918-19 and the insurrections, meant
further violence. In Halle, the Stahlhelm took to the streets on behalf
of Hindenburg. Darré took part in the marches and demonstrations. He

described them enthusiastically, in an essay rejected by one journal.

The Café Orchestra began playing the Erhardt song ‘Hakenkreuz
to the Stahlhelm’, and there was a roar'of applause ... The
march was headed by nine young girls in gym costume. They
were so clean and fresh ... It was inspiring to think, that future
German mothers would be girls like this with such healthy and
supple bodies ... Why had ‘Red Halle’, blood-red Halle in
1919, become ‘Red-white-blue[sic] Halle”? Because of the
presence of over a thousand students of agriculture, energetic
war veterans. The march surged forward unstoppably.°*

In 1923, when the French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr, it
was the Stahlhelm who sang the forbidden ‘Deutschlandlied’, and the
old army song, ‘We will hammer the French, and win’ (Siegreich
wollen wir Frankreich schlagen), a song whose refrain was, ‘when you
go away, we'll be there’, phrases which recall chillingly the millions of
corpses on the: Western Front. ‘In summer, 1922, it was risky to wear
the Stahlhelm insignia in public, especially at the time of the Rathenau
murder. Three years later, the Stahlhelm rules the streets in Halle.’
Darré attended Stahlhelm rallies and veteran’s reunions (banned, but
held under the guise of a ‘Prussian Day’), between 1922 and 1925.52

Who was Darre?

He was to comment in December 1925, when he moved to Giessen
University for a term’s graduate work, that it was a quiet unpolitical
town, with none of the day-to-day political intensity and involvement
of Halle, which was polarised between its large SPD and KPD
working class, and supporters of nationalist parties. Darré had noted
several times between 1922 and 1925 that ‘red workers’ were drifting
into the ‘fatherlandish’ movements, but commented from Giessen that
it was good not to be attacked in the streets by Communists just
because you weren’t a worker. ‘While the Stahlhelm in Halle had lost
five dead and badly injured during 1925, here you can ask the worker

the way or the time of day without fear’.°?

Darré had moved well to the right of his family by. 1923, although

within ten years his siblings and their spouses caught up, and became
enthusiastic NSDAP members. He analysed the attempted putsch of
November 1923 in Munich for his father, suggesting that it had been
‘cleverly smashed’ by the Bavarian Right to discredit Hitler. The left-
wing press, he thought, blurred real differences of interest between
right-oriented groups.

If you stand on the left (by which I mean the left-wing of the
People’s Party—Centre Democrats—Social Democrats then
Militarism-Ludendorff-Anti-Semitism-Von Kahr-Bavaria is seen
as a unity, to be fought against as an ethical duty.

Darré attributed Kapp’s opposition to the fact that Hitler’s movement
had support among workers ‘contrary to expectations’, that Hitler was

trying to unite the Sozial movement, and had attracted support.

because Kahr was corrupt. ‘Hitler may be a hothead, and not have a
very political mind, but he represented a growing protest movement,
that could not be crushed by force alone, in the way that Kapp’s
military putsch could be crushed.’ Darré prophesied that it was essential
to keep a close watch on ‘this extraordinary current of ideas’ in future
months, years and decades, ‘not because I want to defend it, or because
it lies close to my heart, but because no one will understand Germany’s
internal politics if they don’t.’ He interpreted Hitler’s working-class
support as due to the economic failings of the republic, but ‘I will be
surprised if a man appears who can produce productive work for
them, instead of destroying themselves and others in wild opposition.’
Darré pointed out that the national army, under von Seeckt, had not
supported the rebellion, and suggested that Captain Erhardt had been
allowed to escape from prison in order to help crush Hitler in
Munich.54

a a a re

Antai mae

Who was Darré?

Was Darré more sympathetic to National Socialism than he was
prepared to state in writing, especially to a disapproving father? In
February 1923, worried about his lack of political involvement, he
decided to express his feelings in a dramatic gesture, and, with a group
of friends, joined the DVFP, or German People’s Freedom Party. In
March 1921, an agreement had been reached between Hitler and Von
Grife, leader of the DVFP that the latter would have a free hand in
north Germany. NSDAP members complained that the DVFP was
insufficiently radical and too conservative. “The poster inscribed ‘Jews
and National Socialists are forbidden membership” was still fresh in
our memory’, wrote one Nazi farmer in 1937. Darré told his wife that
the membership was growing rapidly and came mainly from the
workers. ‘The vélkisch movement could never crystallise here as it could
in Bavaria under Hitler.’

So ... a new political party was founded on a purely national
socialist basis, i.e. unceasing struggle against all Jewry and
Parliamentarianism. ... In this I am now to the right of the
German nationalists, and according to Wiesbaden ideas I belong
in the madhouse, at least according to the Frankfurter Zeitung,
which is the Bible with you,

he told his wife. His membership lapsed the next year, and appears to
have been completely inactive. Darré failed to mention it in his NSDAP
application in 1930, and always described himself as a latecomer to
party politics. He failed also to mention it in his interrogation by the
Allies in 1945, and while there were obvious reasons for-playing down
his early political involvement with the Allies, he could only have
gained kudos by stressing it with his Nazi colleagues. His 1933
biographer claimed that Darré and a friend, Theo Habicht (see below,
p. 75) had thought of joining the NSDAP in Wiesbaden in 1928, but
had decided against it because of the damage it might do to their
employment prospects. Certainly, Darré’s wife joined the Wiesbaden
branch of the NSDAP.55

Darré’s letters to his wife between 1923 and 1925 often attacked
what he variously called Jewry, the Jews and Jewishness. Yet in his
published works up to 1929 there were no anti-semitic statements.
Darré’s position seems to have been that he was a political anti-semite,
and felt no personal animus towards particular Jews. His position
regarding Jews and race will be considered later in the book; this
section will deal with his views in the early 1920s.

Many of Darré’s attacks on Jews were because he associated them

Who was Darre?

with democracy. There seem to be two separate points here; firstly,
why did he so associate them, and secondly, why was he so anti-
democracy?

Democracy in Germany at this time was not a buzz-word of
approval; in fact, in some circles it was an insult, as, in earlier times in
England, to call someone a Jacobite, a Tory or a demagogue was an
insult. Indeed, Gladstone had protested when called a democrat, as he
considered that the insult was so bad as to be outside the boundaries of
acceptable parliamentary abuse. Many Germans outside the traditional
conservative Right saw a democratic parliament as a means of abusing
working-class power against the small businessmen, the farmers and the
army; further, they saw it as essentially ‘undemocratic’, in that democracy
was seen as a cover under which powerful vested economic interests could
manipulate the population, a view entirely shared by the Communists.
The popular press, the cinema, the legal system, were seen as a means
of manipulation, not as a genuine expression of popular feelings.

Many modern studies of the 1920s have examined the extent to
which the pre-1914 social structure was retained. Industrialists, generals
and landowners are presented as engaged in a continuous and vicious
fight against the frail, struggling forces of democratic virtue. There
must have been, of course, industrialists who retained their possessions
and fortunes through war, revolution and hyper-inflation; army officers
who still held their posts, and landowners who had not been forced to
sell their land for worthless currency in 1923. But the usefulness of
physical assets as a hedge against inflation can be exaggerated. You
cannot pay bills or buy bread out of bricks and mortar. The effects of
the inflation were to render fixed incomes and pensions valueless, to
bankrupt many creditors, and to interfere with internal trade. This,
together with the effects of the war-time blockade, had meant years of
hunger and sickness. In 1919, 90% of all hospital beds were occupied
by TB cases. British observers in Germany such as Keynes commented
on the starving children, the faces yellowed by shortages of fats.56 One
striking feature of photographs of German crowds in the 1920s—as in
Britain in the 1930s—is the gaunt faces. Farmers were prepared to
barter their goods, but reluctant to sell: what could industrial workers
offer to men who would not accept worthless currency? Up to 1925,
unemployment remained high, and the Weimar government’s attempt
to palliate conditions for the urban workers by means of high welfare
benefits had to be paid for, in part, by taxing the farming community.
This inequality of tax burdens was a major factor in farming support
for the NSDAP in the early 1930s.

Who was Darré?

German nationalists held democracy responsible, and tended to
consider ‘Jewish democrat’ to be one word. Certainly, there were Jews
among the new government, and some commentators, like Thomas
Mann, saw this as an index of a new humanity and tendency to.
socialism.°” The statistical disproportion was hardly surprising.
Conservative and monarchical structures tend towards exclusivity; in
Europe such structures traditionally excluded Jews: not always literally,
as legal constraints against Jews in the professions, in land-owning and
in the non-Prussian army were abolished in nineteenth-century
Germany. But many successful Jews felt that they were not fully
accepted, although a kind of parallel hierarchy developed in the social

-and economic expansion of Wilhelmine Germany. The social

democratic governments that emerged from the collapse of the
European empires in the early 1920s contained a high proportion of
Jewish members, as did the Marxist revolutionaries of Russia and
Hungary, not to mention the leaders of the revolutionary councils in
Germany. Russian Jews were the most likely of the Russian minorities
to have the language skills and foreign contacts necessary to become
ambassadors to and negotiators with other countries, and were thus
more noticeable. There are, of course, methodological problems in
making generalisations of this kind, but they are problems unique to

“this area. If Croats had emerged in prominent positions in several

European nations during the 1920s, it would have been a matter for
considerable comment. If the movements associated with prominent
Croats were seen as hostile to traditional nationalist values, it would
have been commented on adversely. German nationalists, especially the
less conservative ones, reacted in this way to the prominence of Jews in
democratic and socialist movements, while nationalist German Jews
seemed to switch their allegiance from the lost Wilhelmine empire to
Zionism in the 1920s.

Since the Second World War, people have become infinitely more
sensitised to the issue of labelling people or groups in a pejorative way,
and especially when those concerned are Jewish. Generalisations have
continued to be made about other groups, tribes, nations and races,
both in historical and scientific works and in everyday life. But there is
a convention thät it is perceived as anti-semitic to label someone a Jew
if the context is pejorative, but methodologically’ sound to label
someone a Jew if the context is favourable. For example, writers in the
1920s (including Keynes) who labelled the early Soviet leaders as
Jewish have been attacked as anti-semitic; but Trotsky could be
labelled as Jewish once he began to oppose Stalin. Einstein is usually

Who was Darré?

labelled as Jewish, although not a practising Jew; but anyone writing
about ‘the Jewish criminal Stavisky’ would be perceived as anti-semitic.
This leads to problems in understanding the mentality of 1920s
Germans. If one were to write that Jews have always been in the
forefront of movements designed to liberate the poor and oppressed,
that they have always taken up the cudgels on behalf of trade
unionists, idealistic internationalists and victims of superstition, one
would be saying, objectively, exactly what the völkisch writers of the
1920s were saying; that Jews supported Socialism and atheism, and
opposed conservative nationalism. For the historian, a more important
aspect is, not whether these accusations were anti-semitic, but whether

they were true. Only then can the perceptions and motivations of the

time be understood.
Darré, in his anti-semitic pronouncements, was not only supportin
conspiracy theories, but trying to construct a model of the future,
insofar as it would affect him and his family. He thought that Jews in
various countries would automatically act in support of their fellow
Jews elsewhere, and would automatically change their national
allegiances when they felt their interests threatened. He thought that
Jewish interests had brought America into the war, because they saw
that ‘Albion’s star was sinking’, and that only America and Germany
could stand alone: they chose to support America. He asserted that the
Jews supported a United States of Europe because ‘seen from the
financial-technical—i.e. Jewish—point of view’ this was the most
efficient way to control industrial production; the Dawes plan was a
means to that end. Darré thought that the völkisch movement was the

one danger to this plan, but that the ‘farcical failure of the Hitler

putsch’ meant that it was impotent. At the time of the Locarno Pact
negotiations, he argued that France was waiting for Germany to
collapse. He admitted what he saw as Jewish sense of identity and
tribal feeling, but resented it too. ‘The Jews think they have the right
to build up land in Palestine as much as they want, but we in
Germany must not do so’. He argued that Jews wanted to deny
nationhood to others because they saw it as a danger to themselves, but
claimed the right to nationhood. He ended a tirade against ‘this
damnable concept of internationalism ... Marx, Lasalle, both Jews’
with the prophetic comment: io == ,

The choice is now between nationalism and internationalism,

that is, between anti-semitism and. pro-semitism ... and I think
l can safely say that 90% of students are antisemitic.

Who was Darre?

Modern scholars have agreed with this estimate. During the 1920s,
Jews were excluded from many student associations. One such `
association was refused a grant from the Prussian Ministry of Education
unless it accepted Jews, but preferred to forego the grant rather than
change their rule. The fact that ministries opposed anti-semitism
among the young enhanced its attraction.?®
“In short, when Darré associated the ‘Soviet star’ with the Jews, he
was expressing a widely held view of the time. He thought the post-
war economic chaos a result of trying to enforce the international debt
system, and associated manipulative democracy with Jews. His main
attacks in his letters were reserved for France, but it was so obvious to
him that France was an enemy that he did not blame her for her
hostility. He decided that the nationalist movement in Germany was
the only movement prepared to defend Germany against France, and
organised Jewry, inside and outside Germany, was the undying enemy
of this nationalism for power-political reasons. This was a political
anti-semitism which should not be confused with his Nordic racialism.
The 1920s certainly saw an attempt to build a new economic
international order, with sporadic attempts to incorporate two ‘rogue’
powers, Germany and Russia. From January 1924, indeed, Germany
knew stabilisation and economic growth to a remarkable extent. The

“new mark was introduced, and an American banker, Charles Dawes,

evolved a new system for reparations. This was known as the Dawes
Plan, and recommended that reparation payments be balanced by
Germany’s ability to pay each year; and was followed by American
capital flows into Germany. Unfortunately, this early example of debt
rescheduling ran into problems. The capital was short-term money,
funnelled into long-term investment. When the American crash of
1929 came, the money was withdrawn, leading to the near-collapse of
the German economy. By 1932, six million men were unemployed.
The Dawes plan had been attacked from the first by German
nationalists, firstly because it accepted the idea of reparations, and
secondly because it was seen as a means of extending the hegemony of
New York bankers (and, by extension, the Jews). Every attempt to
negotiate with other nations by the Weimar Government was attacked
as a betrayal of German interests.

The rapid. political changes, the loss of territory and ‘face’, the
economic misery and uncertainty, went along with an explosion of
intellectual discontent. 1920s Germany was in many ways similar to a
Third-World post-colonial society in its mentality, existing institutions
seen as alien and hostile. Anything was possible given the human will.

Who was Darre?

Nothing was possible, given human inadequacies. In this ferment,
Darré began to develop his extraordinary package of ideas. Like a more
nationalist Che Guevara, he opposed capitalism and the town. He
sought a new form of corporatism, in which farmers would govern
themselves, and factories become unnecessary. Most elements of his
views were not original, and some of their sources will be discussed in
the next chapters. What was original was the fusion of these elements
into a unique combination of messianic despair and voluntarist
optimism. This gave him his force, his following, his brief triumph and
eventual inevitable failure. The force of the ideas developed in the
1920s drove him to seek office in the 1930s. It was to prevent him
from compromising with Hitler, and led to his downfall.

CHAPTER TWO

Odin’s Ravens

We live today in an age when the desire to return to one’s ethnic and
cultural roots is taken for granted. Even the most internationalist
intellectuals make exceptions in their dogma for the fashionable
minorities; the Bretons, the Basques, the Orcadians, the blacks, and
threatened, or supposedly threatened Third World tribes. There is a
tendency to assume that majority groups cannot be threatened, and
therefore cannot attract the sympathy or interest of the observer.
Majorities are out; minorities are in. Volumes have been written about
this strange intellectual quirk, and this is not the place to try to
investigate it. lt may, however, be useful here to remind the reader
that most groups can, objectively speaking, be threatened, whether
majority or minority. Germany for much of the 19th century was a
potential majority scattered over and among minorities. At this period

-the ‘nationalities question’ meant the right to national self-

determination of Germans, Magyars, Italians and Poles, four major
European groups whose ethnic boundaries did not coincide with their
political boundaries. The search for roots was not confined, in short, to
the German romantics. The discovery of ancient graves.complete with
bodies helped to inspire an interest in physical anthropology, and in
France and Scandinavia, history was now seen as the result of
conflicting racial and tribal forces. Who were the people of Bronze
Age Europe? Where did they come from? How were language groups
related to ethnic groups? What was the pattern of settlement and
colonisation of Europe?

By the late nineteenth century, new self-conscious groups were
emerging. These included the Balkan states, and those Slav nations
invented by the agile minds of a handful of Oxford historians. They
also: included. the Scandinavian countries of northern Europe, the
Nordic nations. Nordic has become a word associated so exclusively
with Nazi propaganda that it is always a surprise to encounter it as a
value-free description of Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and
Finland, which is how the word is still used. Originally, the word
simply meant northern, and became commonly used to describe the

Odin’s Ravens

tribes of northern Europe, along with ostische, westische and südische,
although it was temporarily substituted for ‘Aryan’ in the 1920s.
Nordic was not co-terminous with Aryan, Indo-European or
Germanic. Aryan originally referred to the tribes of the Iranian plains,
and was used as such by Darré in the 1920s. ‘Indo-European’ referred to
a language group.!

Some definitions of ‘German’ seem absurdly wide, as when H.S.
Chamberlain used the word to mean all non-Mediterranean and non-
Tartar peoples (i.e., to include, ‘Germanic Celts,’ and ‘Germanic
Slavs’). This was the racial definition, used as a catch-all to ensure that
famous German heroes, such as Luther, did not slip through the net.
The later categorisation of northern Europeans into five or six sub-

races cut across national boundaries, but this time cut across existing `

concepts of Germanness, too. As was pointed out at the time by anti-
Nazi journals, many Nazi leaders were themselves non ‘Nordic’.
However, the common notion that all Nordics were supposed to be
blonde is misconceived.?

Northernness had its appeal in England, too. English nationalists
and populists were inspired by the world of the sagas and Norse
myths. William Morris, J.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are among those
who looked for inspiration to the treeless hills of the north, the wide,
sandy dunes and the chilly seas, in part because of the appropriation of
the natural and the spontaneous carried out by Arnoldian celtophiles.
In his autobiography, C.S. Lewis described his yearning for
‘Northernness’, and his reaction on opening the Rackham illustrated
Twilight of the Gods,

... this was no Celtic or sylvan or terrestrial twilight ... Pure
Northernness engulfed me: a vision of high clear spaces hanging
above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer,
remoteness, severity ... the same world as Baldur and the
sunward-sailing cranes ... something cold, spacious, remote.>

In 1922 a work called Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Racial
Handbook of the German People) was published by Hans Giinther, and
became a best-seller. It differed from earlier popular works on race and
culture in its deliberately scientific attitude and analytical vein. The
vélkisch writers of the late 19th century had concerned themselves more
with art, culture, civilisation and spirit than with quantitative physical
distinctions between groups. They wrote in the tradition of German
idealism. Günther, working from recent developments in physical

Odin’s Ravens

anthropology and eugenics, argued that mankind was divided into
races which differed in physical structure and mental character. The
highest type was the Nordic, comprising the populations of
Scandinavia, north Germany, Holland, Britain and the United States.
The inclusion of the United States may seem surprising, but the USA
was still seen by some as an Anglo-Saxon country. For example, Lenz,

‘co-author of a text-book on biology, had called on the USA to lead a

‘blonde international’ after the First World War.4

The Nordic movement that arose in the 1920s was first. a pan-
national and a cultural one; it searched for ancient northern myths and
sagas, and, especially in Denmark and Germany, it emphasised the
rural nature of the Nordics—in fact the peasant adult education
movement known as the Bauernhochschulbewegung had its origin in
Denmark. The Nordics were seen as racially and culturally threatened.
They were surrounded by other groups, split between nations, without
their own territory or unity, and their birth-rate was declining, as was
the German growth rate since 1912. However, most Nordicists jibbed
at supporting breeding communes of the kind suggested by Willibald
Hentschel in Varuna in 1907. The close, monogamous family was seen
as essentially Nordic.5

Despite his scientific attitude to physical, measurable differences,
Giinther’s analysis of mental characteristics was superficial, in the
anecdotal, descriptive fashion rendered respectable by Max Weber.®
Nordics were reserved but trusting, creative, had a sense of justice, and
were good fighters. Mediterranean peoples were lively, unserious,
charming, etc. A description of physical differences ‚between groups
and races is still part of physical anthropology, but scientists on the
whole have been relieved to leave to journalists generalisations about
the spiritual qualities of different groups, except where they relate to
quantifiable elements, such as differences in glandular secretions or
brain structure. This is not to say that sensitive, perceptive comments
about groups have no role to play, still less that they should be banned,
but it was unfortunate for Günther and other racialist writers that they
tended to confuse their own common-sense perceptions (notoriously a
bad guide for scientific comment) with the results of carefully conducted
surveys. In the case of Chamberlain, who in his later years abjured
Darwinism in favour of a vitalist philosophy, his anti-semitism seemed
to lose its strictly racial content, and become more culture-oriented.”

For the German Nordicists, Scandinavia was seen as the rural ideal.
Hans Giinther married a Swede, and lived in Sweden during the 1920s
for some years. Scandinavian writers were popular. Knut Hamsun and

Odin’s Ravens

Selma Lagerlöf depicted a stern, hard-working, but deeply satisfying
peasant society. The peasant was strong, inarticulate, but superior. In
Scandinavia, where there were very few Jews, there was little anti-
semitism in the Nordic movement; instead, animosity was directed to
the petty bourgeois townsman and bureaucrat as the enemy of the
peasant. The town meant administration, taxes, small-mindedness and
tuberculosis. Adventurous industry was acceptable: it meant opening
up the land with roads and railways, and scope for individualism.®
Anti-semitism was scarcely visible in the published writings of the
German Nordicists, but certainly the Jew was identified as ‘the enemy’
of the Nordic movement in Germany, something that emerges more
clearly from their private correspondence.’

The exclusive and tribal character of the Nordic movement meant
that Hitlers National Socialism could never fully absorb it. The
Nordics offered Northernness as the best, the most important part of
the German heritage. In doing so, they excluded the Catholic parts of
Germany, including the blonde, blue-eyed German Catholics of
Austria and much of south Germany, also the Rhineland states. The
Nordics preferred Protestantism to Catholicism, because Protestantism
was seen as the Northern reaction to an alien Christianity, a move
back to the purer, more individualistic spirit of the north. The
National Socialists, on the other hand, especially in office, offered a
movement of German unity above particularist loyalty. When Darré
started a group in 1939 to study northern customs and report on
eugenic questions, he did so as a deliberate gesture of defiance, and in
conditions of semi-secrecy. One of the most important early Germanic
racialists, Lanz von Liebenfels, had his writings banned in 1938 while
other occultist racialists were banned as early as 1934. Schultze-
Naumburg’s 1930 plans for a ‘high-quality racial core’ were also laid in
secret. The fissionable nature of Nordic thinking was recognised and
feared by Goebbels, certainly, well before 1933.*°

The main eugenic interest among Nordicists was to preserve what
they feared was a dying group. It was a defensive concept, a fact
which is obscured with talk of ‘Supermen’ and ‘Master Race’, phrases
which are rare in Nordicist writing. What was at issue was not the
breeding of a superior race, but the preservation of a threatened race.
This theme of Nordic vulnerability was to be prominent in Darré’s
work, especially where the Nordic peasant was concerned. Here, the
threat lay not only in a decline of the birth rate, economic hardship,
cultural decay, but in urbanisation.

Darré began to read Giinther in 1923, and in 1926 was given an

Odin’s Ravens

immensely popular vélkisch work, Julius Langbehn’s Rembrandt als
Erzieher. Langbehn was interested in cultural history more than
scientific racial questions (the first, 1890 edition of his book contained
no mention of the Jews, although in later editions, two anti-semitic
chapters were added). He combed European history for great Germans,
or great men of German stock. ‘German’ was always a fluctuating and
difficult historical and ethnic concept, and it was easy to write
Germanness out of European culture by re-labelling. The borders of
the German states and confederations had fluctuated so much that
German identity was in a state of permanent confusion. There was a
sense, especially among intellectuals, that their moral and psychic space
was insecure. There was a national inferiority complex. Not only did
political parties after 1871 include the word German in their formal
titles; the full title was always used; the German National Party, and so
on, indicating that national identity could not be taken for granted.!1

Ernst von Salomon, the conservative Weimar intellectual, writer,
and former Freikorps member, wrote in 1951 that, born in Kiel before
the First World War, he was a Prussian, not because he was bom in
Schleswig-Holstein, then under Prussian rule, but because of his
ancestry—although his father was born in St Petersburg, and his
mother in England. He explained that this was because he had no
‘biological connection’ with Kiel, St Petersburg and England. This
comment encapsulates one of the main distinctions between German
identity and that of other European nations, In England, for example,
nationality had a territorial quality, but historically, the German
concept of Germanness was so little linked with territory, that the 1848
liberal Frankfurt Parliament had proposed to give the vote to all
German émigrés living outside Germany, be it in America, Russia or
elsewhere in Europe. The identity problem was exacerbated by the fact
that the two largest and most powerful German states, Prussia and
Austria-Hungary, both had substantial non-German populations; in
fact, they were multi-racial entities. From Herder onwards,
‘Germanness’ had been defined largely in terms of language. What
Langbehn was trying to do was to define Germanness in terms of
ethnicity. +?

He set out to establish an idea of Germanness that was to be found
in art and culture over the centuries, wherever people of Germah
ethnic stock had settled. He located the full flowering of this
Germanness in Rembrandt, who came from the Netherlands, a point
not lost on Langbehn’s nationalist critics. Langbehn was uninterested in

party politics and the German Reich, and was attacked for implying

Odin’s Ravens

that the Prussia-dominated German state after 1871 was in some way
inferior to the Netherlands. ‘Will Germany rule the world if every
German becomes a Rembrandt? Will this rescue us?’ asked an
anonymous author in the 1890s. ‘Holland and Switzerland are
presented as ideal states, but what would become of German power if
this idea were carried through?’ This comment encapsulates the
opposition between the ‘Greater Germany’ answer to a search for
German identity, and the power-political, common-sense answer,
which was to rely on a Prussian-dominated Germany. Langbehn’s
weakness lay not so much in the idea behind his work, unpopular as
this was with many powerful groups in the thrusting expansionism of
Wilhelmine Germany, as in the wild over-simplification of his
pronouncements. He idealised the peasant, seeing him as the true
aristocracy. This idea at once coincided with and codified Darré’s thinking.

The Lower German (Niederdeutsche) is a born aristocrat in
character. No one is more recognisably aristocratic than the true
peasant, and the Lower German is always a peasant. The
peasant, like the farmer of North America, the English Lord,
the old Mark nobility and the South African Boer, belong
spiritually and physically to one and the same family,

he quoted to his wife. Langbehn cited Cromwell as the typical peasant
(sic) turned king, whose eyes were ‘grey and fearsome as the North
Sea’. Darré criticised Langbehn for being one-sided, and found
Chamberlain and Giinther more inspiring, possibly because they were
less concerned with cultural and spiritual elements. !?

Along with his reading, and a sense of rootlessness, went a growing
obsession with his own ancestry. His sister Carmen shared his interest,
and visited Sweden to track down their ancestors there. He was pleased
to find a noble Norwegian ancestor in the thirteenth century, as well
as sixteenth-century French Darrés, and addressed the Halle Genealogical
Society several times while a student.

He described Giinther’s Rassenkunde as ‘wonderful’. He meditated,
‘I feel tremendously drawn to the Lower Germans and Lower Saxons—
am probably more Lower Saxon than really Nordic in Günther’s
absolute meaning of the word.’ He told his wife to soak herself in
Giinther’s book Style and Race, so that their children could be prevent
up “Nordically’.

Good, 100% Nordic children cannot come from our marriage.
But you could bring them up in such a way that their Nordic ©

Odin’s Ravens

blood, in so far as it is prominent, feels-at home in their
upbringing.!*

Darré found in Giinther’s highly complex and finely tuned
categorisations an explanation for his unhappy home as a boy. His
parents had failed to cope with the problems caused by his ‘mixed
blood.’ He commented in his second book, Neuadel, on his sense of
uprootedness and search for Germanness. ‘One kills the German soul if
you remove the countryside where it was born ... For a child brought
up in the terribly cold spirit of the American milieu, it is impossible to
understand German myths’ tales and legends.’ His younger brother
Erich, now working on a doctorate at Marburg University, he
described as ‘a Nordic dreamer through and through’, who also had
not learned to cope with the problems of the Nordic heritage. ‘If he
had been brought up in Nordic circles he would not have got mixed
up with coffee-house intellectualism.’ He concluded that many of what
he had always considered personal weaknesses of his own character and
manner (dreaminess, indecision, anger) were probably the result of his
heredity ‘although one can escape from some of these characteristics’,
he added, with that puzzling mixture of a belief in heredity and in
will-power and environment, that was to characterise his later political

_views. For example, at this time he described Prussia as a successful

mixture of types and races, held together by political tradition and
will, a position he was later to oppose. 15

His article on ‘Internal Colonisation’, which will be discussed in the
next chapter, was followed by a jeu d'esprit on Walter Rathenau’s pre-
First World War racial concepts. Rathenau was the millionaire Jewish
son of an industrialist, who became Foreign Secretary under Ebert and
was murdered in 1922 by a nationalist group. One of their grievances,
according to Salomon, an accessory to the murder group, was that
Rathenau, as a Jew, had no right to be a German nationalist, and
further, was a fascist. Rathenau had been influenced by Germanic
racialist ideas, which he combined with the peculiarly liberal
imperialism of the type associated in Britain with Joseph Chamberlain
and Cecil Rhodes.1® The article began by announcing that Nordicists
were wrong to attack Rathenau, and gave extracts from Rathenau’s
pre-war work Reflections, such as, ‘Voluntary, instinctive respect rests
completely on racial perceptions. One would rather obey a noble,
white hand than clever arguments.’ Or,

The task of the coming time will be to breed and to train up
the dying or impoverished noble races needed by the world ...

Odin’s Ravens

Man must follow this course deliberately, as used to be done by
Nature, the course of ‘Nordicisation’. A way of life which is
physical, full of endurance, severe climate and solitude.

Rathenau stressed the need to breed a new ruling nobility from Aryan
stock, and talked of exalting pure Nordic blood, and imitating natural
eugenic processes in order to produce a stronger Aryan race. Race,
eugenics and new nobilities were in the air both before and after the
First World War. For example, in 1921, the son of a Prussian
nobleman and Japanese mother, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, wrote a
pamphlet, New Nobility, in which he advocated the breeding of a new
master-race which would rule Europe. Two master-races already
existed in Europe, the Germans and the Jews; they should join to breed
an unbeatable super-nobility, he argued. Despite this somewhat
unexpected conclusion to his argument, Kalergi was on the invitation
list for the National Peasant Council meetings during the Nazi regime,
although it is not known whether he attended them (he was then in
Switzerland). Kalergi, whose grandmother was a friend of Houston
Stewart Chamberlain, was a founder member of the European
Movement after the Second World War.!” Another supporter of a
joint German-Jewish aristocracy, fighting democracy together, but not
interbreeding, was Dr Oscar Levy, editor of Gobineau and Nietzsche,
who reproved Gobineau for not paying enough attention to the pure
blood of the Jewish nobility. Levy was to defend Nietzsche after the
First World War against the charge that he had inspired German soldiers.*®

Darré knew perfectly well that Rathenau was merely expressing the
intellectual fashions among ambitious Wilhelmine businessmen, but,
tongue in cheek, he announced his desire to show that Jews could be
splendidly racialist. The article caused a stir among Nordicists, and was
immediately reprinted, without permission, by smaller periodicals. He
followed it up two years later by a further collection of racialist
quotes, adding this time Disraeli’s well-known pronouncement from
Coningsby that ‘Race is the key to world history’.*9

The Rathenau article was important because it introduced Darré to
Nordicist circles, and people who were to play a major part in his life.
They included the founders of the Nordic Ring, a loose collection of
Nordicist groups, which aimed at coordinating all the Nordic
movements, established in May 1926 by Hanno Konopacki-Konopath,
a top civil servant (Ministerialrat), and his wife, Princess Marie
Adelheid Reuss zur Lippe. They published Nordische Blätter and
Konopacki was later to edit Die Sonne. Darré and Marie Adelheid

Odin’s Ravens

promptly formed a close political alliance, and became personal friends.

Darré called her his ‘Little Sister’, and was godfather to one of her
children. She edited several collections of Darré’s writings. He lectured

her on eugenics, and sent her reading lists.?°

Other members of the Nordic Ring included Erdprinz zur Lippe,
later to work for Darré, and a member of the 1939 Society of Friends
of the German Peasantry, and a Baltic German, Freiherr von
Vietinghoff-Scheel, an émigré to Germany who lost his lands in the
Baltic to the Russians, and later lost his farm in Germany through the
Depression. His daughter, Charlotte, became Darré’s secretary in 1929,
when they stayed with Paul Schultze-Naumburg in his home, Burg
Saaleck, and she was to be his second wife. Vietinghoff-Scheel was the
author of Grundzüge des völkischen Staatsgedankens (Foundation of Populist
National Constitutional Ideals), which demanded the exclusion of Jews
from public life.?!

Charlotte Vietirighoff-Scheel is remembered as a polished, elegant,
well-educated ‘gentlewoman’ (it is interesting that the English term
was used). Frau Schultze-Naumburg was a match-maker. The young
daughter of a Baltic nobleman was a better companion for their
admired friend than the unseen, difficult wife, living in semi-separation.
Darré, who missed the close contact with his own brothers and sisters,

‘now married, liked Charlotte’s family. His jokey, sketch-scattered

letters now went to Karen von Billabeck, Charlotte’s sister, as well as
to Marie Adelheid. He found Charlotte, who was ten years younger
than he was, attractive and companiable, and fell in love.

They became secretly engaged, and he wrote to ‘tell Alma. The
marriage had more or less broken up in 1927, partly because of the
strain of constant financial problems, the separations, and partly
because of Alma’s jealousy over Darré’s friendships with other women.
Although he did not have the reputation of a womaniser, he found it
easier to form close and affectionate relationships with intelligent, lively
women than with men. The daughter of the landlord at Gut Aumühle
had continued to exchange letters with Darré for the next ten years, for
example. Also, Alma, while a strong-minded woman, and thus the
‘source of strength’ that Darré wanted, had known him through the
days of his failure; now that he had found a niche, he seemed to
develop the confidence to break away.

He left the decision about a divorce up to Charlotte (known as
Charly), but told Alma that he regarded Charly as his real wife.
Nonetheless, he mused wistfully on the Japanese habit of having first
and second wives. Alma tried to understand exactly what she had failed

Odin’s Ravens

to supply. Had he been happier at Saaleck, she asked? Darr& responded
that it was not happiness that he had found, but an inner freedom: he
now felt able to draw on his own strength. It is unclear whether
politics had anything to do with the break-up. Charly’s father, who
belonged to the Nordic Ring, was probably more sympathetic to
Darré’s views than the hard-headed merchant, Jacob Stadt, Alma’s
father. But Charly, despite the fact that she had been unconventional
enough to become secretly engaged to a married man and, once
divorced, married him—surely unusual behaviour for a well-brought
up girl of good family in those days—remained unconnected with
politics, apparently through reticence. She seldom appeared at public
functions, and did not involve herself in party matters. Yet she
obviously provided some strength and inspiration for Darré to draw on,
and the marriage was a close and happy one. He still continued to
write to Alma until 1931, and the correspondence was resumed in
1945, until his death in 1953.

Darré was first contacted by Marie zur Lippe, asking him if he
supported the Nordic Movement, and suggesting that they publish his
Rathenau article. He replied doubtfully that his interests were in
‘scientific animal breeding’, and that he did not really have anything to
offer the Nordicists. He did send her a list of those of his former
teachers at Halle and Giessen who were potential sympathisers, and
interested in ‘racial science’; Professors Krämer, Frölich, Römer and
Holdefleiss. Konopath, however, refused to contact them on Darré’s
recommendation, until he knew more about their stance. ‘Mere racial
hygienists are not always on our side’, he noted. ‘Professor Pohl of
Hamburg, for example, although a racial hygienist, is half-Jewish’.??
While there was a tendency to ascribe Jewish blood to anyone whose
ideas differed in any detail from the party-line Nordicist, Konopath’s
attitude is a useful reminder that racial hygienists, eugenicists and anti-
semitites were not co-terminous.?>

Marie Adelheid had signed herself ‘with Nordic greetings’; but
Darré ended his reply with ‘German greetings’, the first time he used
this nationalist form, and a gesture that signified the secondary role
Nordicism was to play to peasant problems for him. By late 1928, in
Neuadel (p. 29), he reverted to the term ‘Germanic race’, adding, ‘or
the “Nordic” race, according to whichever expression is fashionable.’

The Nordic Movement was based in Berlin and other parts of
North Germany. One Nordic Conference held in June 1930 (or
Brachmond, according to the völkisch calendar then in vogue), was
fairly typical. Hans Günther, by that time appointed Professor of Racial

Odin’s Ravens

Hygiene at Jena by Frick, the National Socialist. Education Minister of
Thuringia, spoke on the education of youth in Nordic thinking. Darré -
summarised the ideas of his book in a talk entitled ‘Blood and Soil as
the Nordic Race’s Foundation of Life’, and Schultze-Naumburg gave
an illustrated talk on the Weimar University of Architecture, Arts and
Crafts. The Conference was attended by members of the Nordic Ring,
the Fighting League for German Culture, the German League, the
League for German World-View, two university groups, the Northern
Order, the Nordic Youth Group, the Society for Northern Beliefs, and
the German Richard Wagner Society. The emphasis was on youth and
culture. One group that attended, the Ahnenerbe League, was later to

- be incorporated into the SS. None of these talks concerned eugenics or

racial hygiene. However, a strong racial feeling underlay the cultural
and educational interests.

The Nordic Ring considers its first and most important task
after the bringing together of all Nordically minded people,
and the creation of a racial nucleus (Rassenkern), the planned
propagation of Nordic ideals.

wrote Konopath on the foundation of the Nordic Ring.

The group held meetings once a month. Between 1929 and 1930,
they heard talks on Viking battles, Darré on old Nordic family customs,
the Nordic world-view, and the Berlin Theatre. Marie zur Lippe led a
discussion entitled ‘Is the Nordic Idea materialistic?’. A speaker from
Oslo gave an illustrated talk on “The Effects of Civilisation and Racial-
Mixing on National Strength’.?4

Most of the speakers were German, with a scattering of members
from Scandinavia. Only one speaker came from Britain, a German
linguist who had been a member of the Allied Commission after the
First World War, and apparently stayed on in Germany. He wrote an
attack on the French behaviour in Germany in 1929, and in 1933 was
to greet Hitler’s rise to power with the call ‘England erwache’.25

There were Nordicist groups elsewhere—such as the well known
circle around Johann von Leers, who then lived in Munich. Darré met
him in 1927, and kept in touch. Dr von Leers spoke fluent Japanese,
and later became a professor at Jena University. He seems to have
worked for the German Labour Front up to 1939, and to have been an
SS member. Darré wrote to Hitler to vouch for Leers’ reliability in
1939. His wife believed herself to be the reincarnation of a Bronze Age
priestess, and held regular meetings at their house, where she would

Odin’s Ravens

wear barbaric gold jewellery. Other guests included an Austrian who
had renamed himself Weissthor, the White Thor, to the irritation of
some of the more aristocratic guests, who pointed out to each other
that Weissthor’s real name was more plebeian. George Mosse, in his
book The Crisis of German Ideology, rather tetchily criticised von Leers
for still being a sun-worshipper in the 1950s, as if the experience of
Naziism should have put anybody off sun-worship. But the rejection
of Christianity and search for Nordic myths and religions long pre-
dated National Socialism, and outlasted it, while Theosophy and
Anthroposophy should also be seen as part of this rejection of
organised religiosity. One consequence of the quarrying of pre-Roman
northern European customs was the formation of Druidical groups in
Germany. Ironically, the German Order of Druids was caught in the
National Socialist anti-Masonic law of 1935, and was closed down,
despite an appeal to Darré, protesting to the last that they were not
Freemasons but good, German Druids.?¢

Darré brought a new element into the Nordic movement. His
training in agriculture, his farming experience, his animal breeding, his
liking for evidence and argument, and his capacity to inspire
enthusiasm and activity all galvanised the movement. He may have
been seen by the later Nazis as an unworldly dreamer, but compared
with the Nordic Ring he was tough and practical. At least, this was
the role he adopted; the plain man of science, the sensible, forthright
polemicist. He blossomed among his new friends. He moved among
them as an outsider, but, perhaps for the first time in his life, as a
superior outsider; more experienced, practical and worldly. He began
to write lively and charming letters, more relaxed than the somewhat
turgid defensiveness of his published works. He sent a postcard of
sultry brunette Pola Negri to Konopath, with ‘If Only 1 were Blonde’
(a contemporary song) written in mauve pencil on the back. Konopath
was not amused. Darré had had these enthusiasms: the sun-worship, the
physical culture and nudism, the free love. He understood them, but
had outgrown them, forced in part to do so by economic pressures and
by his experience with the Baltic farmers. With his military bearing,
loyalty and enthusiasm for the cause, and attractive appearance, he
became socially popular.?”

Despite an occasionally condescending attitude, he did not attack
his fellow Nordicists directly, but his writings often depicted ‘urban
romantics, vegetarians and nudists’ as being foolishly naive in not
understanding Germany’s real problems. He rejected reformism for
outright revolutionary change. He found an enemy—liberal, atomised,

Odin’s Ravens

nomadic capitalism. Before he joined the Nazi. Party, he was careful
not to attack Jews in his writings. And he found an aim, to attack
urban life, and to improve the race through eugenics. He was offering
the sensitive an ideal, and the bewildered a clear line of action. Later, .
Darré was to be written off by the Nazis as a useless theoretician, but
during the 1920s he was seen as daring, radical, but above all a
practical man of action. Men who see on a long term basis nearly
always conflict with those who support or are committed to existing
structures. To those geared to making what existed work, Darré was a
dreamer, because he called for. total change; however, his fellow
Nordicists were not so committed; they were searching for a new
society, and new structures, and here he could offer detailed
prescriptions.

Although his career prospects remained bleak, he found increasing
fulfilment in writing. Six months after leaving Giessen, he began work
on an essay about the link between the Nordic people and the peasant.
Hans Giinther had sent him a copy of a work by Professor Fritz Kern,
also a member of the Nordic Ring. This book, Artbild und Stammbaum
der deutsche Bauern, Racial Types and Genealogy of the German Peasant,
published by Lehmann in 1928, set out to show that the peasants of
Germany belonged to the Dinaric race, and that the Nordic inhabitants

‘had formed a non-agricultural, horse-riding, ruling class. Kern’s book

was copiously illustrated with pictures of hideous, goitrous German
peasants, squinting and bracycephalic. According to Kern, Nordics
were nomadic by nature, and treasured their horses and their ships.
They had originally come from the steppes of eastern Europe, and, far
from being sesshafte Bauern, were incapable of staying in the same place
for long.?®

This argument deeply offended Darré’s own concept of the Nordic,
which was of an inherently peasant race, always rejecting urbanism for
the rural life, unless forced off their own land by unscrupulous
capitalists and landowners. Further, ‘nomad’ was a code word among
the circle around Schultze-Naumburg for the international,
cosmopolitan, rootless eastern European Jew. Darré had written a
pamphlet on the attitude of different races to the homely pig, in which
he argued that the reason why Nordics liked pork and Semites did not
was that the pig symbolised a settled, peasant existence; it was not a
suitable animal for a nomadic way of life. For Darré, everything bad in
history came from the nomadic spirit. Capitalism evolved from the
robber tribes of Arabia, and spread: to Germany via the Teutonic
Knights, who acquired the capitalist spirit from the Arabs in Sicily.

Odin’s Ravens

The hierarchical, leadership principle similarly came from the absolutist
east. Bolshevism was a cover for nomadic exploitation of settled
communities. Concrete buildings and flat roofs, soulless, mechanistic
international architecture—everything symbolised by the Bauhaus was
‘nomadic’. If the Nordic peoples could be shown to be a nomadic
aristocracy who ruled in Germany over foreign races or tribes, it
would undercut Darré’s justification of nation and race, to which a close
bond between people and soil was absolutely fundamental.?°

His original essay grew into a long, unwieldy book, originally
entitled Peasants and Warriors. He described it to Giinther, who answered
that he did not fully agree with Darré on the essentially peasant nature
of the Nordics, seeing them rather as ‘Faustian’ wanderers.

Nonetheless, he should send his work to Lehmann for publication, as.

his side of the story needed to be put, and Darré was ‘one of the few
who really understands how great a role the racial question plays.’>°

The Lehmann publishing House published Deutschlands Erneuerung,
which had taken Darré’s articles between 1926 and 1928. They also
published medical textbooks, and works on racial hygiene and
eugenics. Lehmann, generally regarded as one of the most extreme
nationalist publishers of the 1920s, was interested in works on the
German peasantry. Darré’s work, therefore, combining as it did
eugenics, Nordicism, and the peasantry, found a welcome home with
him. He followed the progress of the book closely, asking Darré to
stress eugenic measures, especially the sterilisation of the hereditarily
sick, but criticising his outspokenness on sexual matters.?! Both
Lehmann and Giinther criticised Darré’s style. The first draft of the book
was over a thousand pages long, and included pages of long quotations
from other writers. Darré assurmed that his readers were idiots, and
laboriously spelled out every single point. ‘Your letters are so
interesting’, complained Giinther to Darré: ‘How is it that you write so
badly?’?2

Darré set to work to re-write the book, apparently unabashed by
the criticism. The result was a densely textured work, which still
hammered home every point. The proof-reading was carried out by
Richard Eichenauer, a fellow-Nordicist and university friend of Darré’s,
who later defended him from attack by patriotic feminists like Sophie
Rogge-Börner.?? Günther then persuaded Darré that he should alter the
language, and delete words of foreign origin where possible, a request
seconded by Lehmann. This was part of the reaction against non-
German cultural phenomena referred to earlier. The 1920s radical
right, in its concern for Germany’s linguistic and cultural heritage, had

Odin’s Ravens

developed a self-conscious use of words of German, as opposed to
Latin, French or Greek derivation. This affected medical and other
scientific writing especially. Darré gave such words as Sterilisation and
Kastration, following them with the German-rooted equivalents,
Unfruchtbarmachung and Entmannung. Later Konkubine was replaced by
Kebsweib, Mutationen by Neubildung.

© Similarly, archaisms were revived, and compound words adopted.
Bauernstand and Bauerntum were words which had no direct modern
equivalent. However, it was not a poetic or archaic style, but one
which ‘mixed erudition, allusion and empirical observation; which used
both intellectual sources and popular ones.’?* Darr& liked to start a
work with a careful delineation of the position he was going to
oppose. He moved slowly and ponderously into attacking position,
then would assertively make his point; following up each tangential
hypothetical point of opposition as it occurred to him, in long,
convoluted sentences.

In the space available, it is impossible to cover all his writings and
ideas—especially as Darré was a most prolix writer, producing fifty-six
articles between 1925 and 1930, besides his two long books. In the next
chapter, the most important elements in his early books and articles
will be discussed. Not only is Nazi agricultural policy inexplicable

‘without an understanding of his ideas, but their revolutionary nature

needs to be stressed. Most past and present interpretations of Darré,
whether they see him as unwordly philosopher or prototype chairman
of the Milk Marketing Board, have failed to do so.?®

CHAPTER THREE

The ‘Sign from Thor’

BLOOD AND SOIL

In the Introduction, some of the puzzled interpretations of ‘Blood and
Soil’ have been mentioned. By 1940 it was a cliche which, as Konrad

Meyer, head of Himmler’s planning office, and Goebbels both wrote,.

had been ridden to death.! It was one of those phrases that so perfectly
fitted a concept, a mood of the time, that no definition seemed
necessary. And since then, the term has been used to cover a range of
Nazi propaganda ideas, Nazi cinema, processions and so on. Use of the
phrase is usually confined to discussions of National Socialism,
although Isaiah Berlin comments that Disraeli’s commitment to “blood
and soil’ was more acceptable than the ‘insane’ ideas of that Nazis.? At
the Nuremberg Trial, in 1948, the trial judge is reputed to have leaned
over and asked Darré’s defence lawyer, Dr Hans Merkel, ‘Exactly what

is “Blood and Soil?” In response, Merkel slammed down photographs
of sturdy peasant men behind the plough, and healthy peasant women
with their children and said, ‘This, my Lord, this is Blood and Soil.’?

But of course, while the glowing images of man and harvest were
obviously a part of the idea, it meant more than radiant health and
high farm incomes. What it implied most strongly to its supporters at
this time was the link between those who held and farmed the land

and whose generations: of blood, _Sweat and tears, had made the soil part _

"the ünwritten history of Europe, a history unconnected with trade, the
banditry of the aristocracy, and the infinite duplicity of church and
monarchy. It was the antithesis of the mercantile spirit, and still appeals
to some basic instinct as a critique of unrootedness. Certainly, it was
not a means of romanticising rural life. National Socialist art stressed
the endurance of the peasant rather than his bank balance, and was far
from the ‘happy, smiling peasant’ supposed to typify the Nazi picture,

while Deutsche Agrarpolitik showed the farmer as an intelligent

technician. What was the origin of the phrase and did it change
significantly over the decades?4

The ‘Sign from Thor’

In the early 1920s, August Winnig, the ex-Social Democrat who
found the SPD too internationalist, brought the phrase into political
prominence. His programme included keeping peasants on the land
and improving the physical condition of Germany’s working class, a
continuation of the great debate over German industrialisation of the
late nineteenth century. Georg Kenstler, himself a Transylvanian
German who was exiled from the enlarged State of Rumania in the
1920s, meant by ‘Blood and Soil’, the title of a magazine he founded in
1927, an integral link between the tribe and the land, a link to be
defended by blood, if necessary. One pan-European nationalist group
of the 1980s proclaimed ‘Blood and Soil’, to be “What we mean by

nation, everything we got from the magic fluid of our ancestors, and

from. our sacred land: these are the eternal truths the Marxists can
never know.’ The phrase seems to have acquired more mystical
overtones for today’s radical nationalists than it had for the German
nationalists of the 1920s. Darré took this phrase, and wove it into his
own work, which set out to show the absolute primacy of the
peasantry.?

In his two major works, he defined the German peasantry as a
homogeneous racial group of Nordic antecedents, who formed the
cultural and racial core of the German nation. Peasant stock provided
the source of population for urban growth. Since the Nordic birth-rate
was lower than that of other races, the Nordic race was under a long-
term threat of extinction. It was also threatened by urban life itself, as
Nordics felt ill-at-ease in towns. Since the urban rate of population
increase was lower than the rural one, it followed that as the peasant
stock drained into the town and there ceased to breed, the peasantry,
and hence the core of the nation, would die off. Darré stressed that the
peasantry could not be replenished from the townsmen. The urban
again. This point separates him from most late nineteenth- -century land
reformers such as Flurscheim and Damaschke, together with others
who wanted urban workers to ‘return to the land’. ‘Blood and Soil’, a
phrase which in England has somewhat abattoir-like connotations, was
intended to express this unity of race and land.®

Darré did not see all nations as possessing this oo Other
races and groups had different imperatives.” ‘described the
Mediterranean peoples, such as the classical Taki the Spanish and
others, as combining a vigorous individuality with a need for a strong
state; whereas the essence of the peasant nature was to be anti-state, but
to have a strong communal feeling: kin rather than class. He was

The ‘Sign from Thor’

enthusiastic about the Chinese, who he saw as the other great peasant
nation, but Semitic and Tartar peoples were nomadic, and lacked the
urge to settle on the land. This meant that they failed to develop habits
of thrift, law and self-government, and remained intrinsically opposed
to the peasants of other nations, whom they would always exploit if
they could.

These kinds of distinctions, these excursions into the true soul of a
nation, were also made by other nationalist writers. Spanish
nationalists, for example, liked to contrast Mediterranean traditions
with northern European ones. They saw the Mediterranean peoples as
essentially more civilised than the eternally primitive Germanic tribes of

the north.” For them, of course, civilisation was a good thing, not a

dirty word.

Roman times. Absolutism and igi came to Germany from the
Teutonic Knights, and the artificial power-state they established in
Prussia. The knights had contracted anti-tribal leadership ideas and an
obsession with money from the Arabs in the course of the crusades.
Despite his nationalism, Darré refused to glorify traditional German
heroes. The peasants had always been the victims, the losers. Since
history tends to be written by the victors, and presents the victor’s
triumph as inevitable, this meant that Darré now opposed many
conservative values. The church was a camouflaged army: the mass
murder of Saxons at Verden was its bloody crown. Charlemagne had

slaughtered thousands of German peasants at Altenesch. ‘Not the’

crucifixion, but this should be our holy place’, he noted. The cause of
the peasantry’s neglect by the German state went back to the ‘collapse
of the Peasant Wars’ in 1525; ‘it cannot be blamed only on the Jews’.
His support of the peasants in the peasant revolt of 1525 again marks
him off as a radical populist from other German vélkisch writers; after
all, the peasants had been ferociously brutal on that occasion. Nomads,
capitalists, feudal lords, cardinals, the Roman empire, the Holy Roman
Empire, the vulgar plutocracy of the Wilhelmine era, law, church and
education—he rejected them all. The spirit of nationalist movements
can often be gauged by their ideal time in history. This folk-
nationalism tends to refer in central Europe to an idealised eighteenth
century; in Denmark to the Viking era; in Britain to the early

‘medieval period. Darré went back to the fifth century a.D., to the

period before the Roman invasions.®

The ‘Sign from Thor’

The peasant symbolised a web of values which decayed in the
monotony and sensory deprivation of industrialisation. Not only racial
factors were at work here. Peasants who left the soil broke their link
with the land, and lost their peasant nature. This was due to the
importance of cultural characteristics in Darré’s definition of Nordicism.
Peasant culture was a result of its Nordic origin; but the Nordic idea
could not survive urban life. Continuity and kinship were essential to
the peasant. If migration to towns broke the generations-old web of
belonging and rootedness, the peasant soul was dead.

‘Many Germans at this period felt that the peasant needed
protection against the pressures of urbanism and industrialisation. Darré

-was practically alone in his criticism of attempts to cope with the

problem by returning people to the land. ‘A peasant as such can
probably be created, but not a Nordic peasant ... Nordic blood can no
longer master other blood’, he wrote in 1926. “The task is to maintain
the existing [peasantry], not to settle doubtful racial elements’. Darré
reserved most of his venom for the German equivalent of well-
meaning Fabians, accusing them of looking at the symptoms of the
problem rather than its economic, social and racial roots. He saw land
reform as a means by which the peasant remnants would be
contaminated by urban workers from an ethnic rubbish bin. He argued
that capitalism destroyed the peasantry, by splitting farmers from their
land, by encouraging a mercantile attitude. Once the peasants had
gone, Germany could no longer defend itself, and its downfall was
inevitable. National renewal was impossible without the ‘life-source’,
the peasantry. So Darré presented a choice between inevitable doom
and a radical, painful effort towards a new society.?

Not only did he hammer at a reformist attitude, which merely
tinkered with the problem, but at a romantic appreciation of rural life.
‘Sentimental and edifying discussions of the evils of modernity, and the
superiority of a pure and noble German soul’, or ‘urban romanticism’
were frequent targets.

Urbanised intellectuals think they can cure the problems with
allotments and home ownership, with ‘rurban’ settlements and
homesteads, with vegetarianism and nudism, without noticing
capitalism’s diabolical sneer at the idea that [these things] ... can
make the system healthy again.

How was the ‘system’ to be rectified? ‘If we want to build a truly
populist state, then we must build it from the agricultural realm.

The ‘Sign from Thor’

Industry and trade will be incorporated into the national economy
according to its needs’.1° This conflation of Nordicism and peasantry,
which, as mentioned earlier, was not common among his fellow
Nordicists, was the rationale for his proposal to form Hegehöfe, or

T í hereditary holdings. Society would divided into corporations, each
‘forming a self-governing chamber, and only farmers from a Hegehof
“would have a vote. The Napoleonic Code sub-division of farms would

cease (this only applied to western Germany in any case), and
primogeniture would be introduced. Foreclosure and sale of farms
would be forbidden. Younger sons would form the militia and the
governing class, leading to the gradual formation of a peasant state
within a state. Because food producers held the whip hand over

parasitical cities, and because of the cultural and racial vitality of the `

peasant world, it would conquer the town: the pays réel would triumph.

The Hegehof was the forerunner of the Hereditary Farm Law of
September 1933. Although the corporatist element was not included in
the legislation, the rest of the original plan was incorporated without
much alteration. In a later chapter, the results of the experiment will
be examined.

For the survival of the peasant state, protection would be needed, —

both from competitive capitalist methods of food production, and
from malevolent manipulators of the world’s commodity markets. An
autarkic trade structure would help defend the peasant from destructive

mercantilist forces within Germany. Darré proposed a national

marketing authority, which would incorporate all primary and
secondary food producers (i.e., biscuits as well as milk), and deal with

distribution and sale of food. There would be quality controls, but no

crop quotas. Here, there were precedents for the idea of taking farming
out of the market economy. Eventually, Britain was to establish
various marketing boards in the 1930s, and Hugenberg evolved a
marketing board in 1932, which some writers have seen as a
forerunner—even inspiration—of Darré’s, but Darré’s plan came from
Gustave Ruhland, Professor of Political Economy at Freiburg, who
was charged by Bismarck with examining the effects of the depression
on European agriculture in 1884. Ruhland became adviser to the
Agrarian League of the 1890s. His agitation against commodity trading
in the 1890s had actually led to the closing of the futures market on
the Berlin Stock Exchange, according to his English translator.!* His
three-volume work, System of Political Economy (Berlin, 1908), proposed
a controlled marketing system for agriculture, and was a profound
influence on Darré, who tried to have his work re-published. He

The ‘Sign from Thor

organised study groups among his agricultural economists, to produce
proposals on Ruhland’s lines for his proposed marketing corporation in
1931-2. The marketing corporation obviously had a potential for
political corporatism, and when. it was established in October 1933.
aroused interest in other European countries, especially France, where
corporatist philosophy was especially strong.!?

“Since dissatisfaction with current marketing was so prevalent, Darré
was able to attract a good deal of sympathy for his plans. As the
National Union of Fertiliser Retailers pointed out bitterly in a
telegram to General Schleicher in 1932, no one was interested in the
problems of the retailer!!?

If Nordics were equated with a rooted peasantry, so the cultural
qualities of the peasantry reflected its Nordicness. Peasant motifs in
German art, past and present, were later to be distinguished by Darré in
works on peasant culture which he commissioned. Deutsche Agrarpolitik
and Odal carried articles on peasant customs and ways of building,
farming.

The rural architecture of the settlement projects so dear to his heart
had to reflect peasant building traditions. This was particularly popular
with farmers who had complained of the institutionalisation of
Weimar architecture, with its flat roofs, leaking metal windows and
unsuitable concrete walls. Buildings made of local timber and stone,
with roofs steeply pitched against wind and snow, seemed more
sensible. The attack on fashionable 1920s architectural modemism, a
style which rapidly became entrenched in an era which saw some 75%
of all housing put up by public authorities, came from ‘many quarters.
Hans Giinther attacked ‘the housing projects of radical architects’ as
‘the work of the nomads of the metropolis, who have entirely lost any
concept of the homeland’, while the Dresden Professor of Architecture
saw ‘nomadic architecture’ as inferior to ‘folk architecture’. Nordicists
emphasised the Asiatic nature of flat roofs, while farmers found
themselves colonised by local government architects who put up

Bauhaus type cowsheds. Both objected.!* iren re

It was an architect, known for his imaginative and radical designs
before the First World War, who_was to offer Darré hospitality when
he became unemployed in late. 1929, and who first introduced him to
Hitler. Paul Schultze-Naumburg’s country house, Burg Saaleck, in
Thuringia, was a centre for vélkisch activists and peasant ideologues,
such as Dr Georg Kenstler, the refugee from Transylvania mentioned
earlier, former Artamanen member, and editor of the magazine Blood

and Soil. Schultze-Naumburg wrote in 1940 that the Erbhof, or

The ‘Sign from Thor’

hereditary family-sized farm, expressed a divine law of order in the

world, and that Blood and Soil, also, was an undying law of nature.
The interesting point “about him is that he was a successful professional
man, leader of the progressives before the war, who began to feel in
the mid-1920s that national architectural styles were under attack by a
cosmopolitan, heartless, featureless modernism. Frick sacked Gropius
from the Bauhaus and made. Schultze-Naumburg head of a new
architectural university, which concentrated more on crafts and the
applied arts. Most of its ex-members emigrated (although one
modernist architect, Mies van der Rohe was a signatory to a patriotic
appeal by Schultze-Naumburg in 1933). Those who have suffered
modernist architecture since, at the whim of the public authorities,

may feel that in this one point, at least, the radical völkisch men of the

1920s were utterly right.!?

A pantheistic religious feeling replaced organised. religion for Darré
and his circle, sectarian differences being subsumed in this attack. A
naturistic holism was seen as compatible with the commitment to
rationalism and the scientific approach. It is interesting to compare here
the pre-First World War pantheistic rationalism of Haeckel, the
biologist, and founder of the Monist League. Haeckel wrote in 1905,

While occupying ourselves with the ideal world in art and
poetry ... we persist ... in thinking that the real world, the
object of science, can be truly known only by experience and
pure reason. Truth and poetry are then united in the perfect
harmony of monism.1¢

Darré’s call to rescue the peasantry and renew the Nordic race was
legitimised for many of his readers by its interweaving with more
widely discussed and accepted issues; eugenics, population policy and
peasant development. His claim to serious learning marked him off
from many vélkisch writers of the period. Coudenhove-Kalergi, for
example, mentioned in chapter Two, prefaced his call for a new
nobility with a ringing declaration that mere scientific veracity was
irrelevant. Darré and the eugenics movement, however, demanded
attention to scientific principles. Lemz, geneticist and racial hygienist,
and co-author of a text-book on eugenics, attacked his critics for being
unscientific in ‘maintaining that biology contains humane principles ...
We know, on the contrary, that science is value-free.’”? ... We must
follow the facts of human heredity wherever they take us’, a position
very different from that of the völkisch Langbehn; ‘the final end of

The ‘Sign from Thor’

FR ‚science is to deliver value judgments’ 18 Scientific en is to be”;
-found both in Engels and in the New Left to-day. Despite the constant:

charge of ‘mysticism’ levelled against Darré, he believed in the existence
of an objective, unalterable truth, and in the possibility of reaching it,
if only the state and the ‘old order’ could be swept away. In Das
Bauerntum, especially, Darré had aimed at a great work of popular
synthesis, like Bélsche’s Love-Life in Nature which had inspired him in
his youth. It was designed for a large readership, and was written, not as
political polemic, but with near religious intensity. Despite the two
hundred references in this book, he failed to cite Spengler anywhere
because, Haushofer argues, Spengler’s pessimism and determinism

would have undercut his argument.!? Darré’s belief that suitably argued

evidence could convince others was untypical of the quasi-existential
German Right of his time. Given Moeller’s distinction, ‘The Left have
Reason, the Right have understanding’, it is perhaps indicative of the
extent to which Darré was totally revolutionary that in this he
conformed neither to Left nor to Right: imperfect in both reason and
understanding, yet reaching for both with an almost febrile intensity.2°

The anti-church campaign was as much a part of this rationalist,
republican attitude as it was nationalist. It would be quite wrong to
imagine that it was merely a propaganda exercise. In fact, from a Nazi
point of view, it was counter-productive. But for Darré’s small circle,
which later included Rosenberg on this issue, the anti-Christian, and
pre-Christian ethos was strong. Rosenberg noted in 1934 that ‘the SS,
together with the peasant leader [Darré] is openly educating its men in
the Germanic way, that is, anti-Christian’.2+ Hitler, who frequently
called on an unaffiliated, unsectarian.God in his speeches, left his public
position uncertain, but Darré mentions his surprise at. hearing Hitler

‘openly — “describing _ Christianity for what it is—a religion for

Untermenschen” in front of a respectable mixed Nazi gathering.2?
In 1934, Darré called on the NSDAP to declare its full Opposition to
the clergy, and in 1942 he felt ‘a great sense of Se when his

than imported Christianity, just as native law was a than the
Napoleonic Code, or the Civil Code introduced in 1896, which
favoured the creditor over the debtor. Darr& underwent a religious
experience in 1934 at the base of a large standing stone in the
Odenwald. ‘What we experienced at the February Stone was a sign
from Thor’, he wrote.2?

The attempt to. interfere with peasant Christianity was often

unpopular, ‚and p pagan ‘calendars sent round to farmers ‚were torn up.

4 s
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The ‘Sign from Thor’

Some of the attempts to instil this fundamentalist approach were
simply trivial, in fact comic, as when Darré circulated a request not to
call pets, seeds and vegetables by the names of the Norse gods: he
attributed it to a ‘circle of reactionary colouring’. But of course, if one
was reading of an attempt to prevent pets and vegetables being called
‘Mohammed’ in a Muslim country, it would seem understandable. In
Britain, many teligious groups would object if a cabbage was called
‘Mary Mother of God’. The very fact that it is hard for us today to
take Darré’s circular seriously indicates the desperate nature of the
rearguard action he was fighting, in trying to awaken interest in the
old German religion.24 D394°.— Tae
C7 Därré continued his link with the Nordic Ring during the 1930s,,
and, on appeal from Rosenberg, helped to recruit members for the
faltering group in 1936. Contact. was maintained with the Danish
peasant movement, and joint ‘Nordic Gatherings’, at which Danish
gymnasts participated, were held until the outbreak of war. But
contacts between the Third Reich and Scandinavian countries
gradually declined. A close federation between Scandinavia and
Germany was not one of Hitler’s major policy aims, whatever the
rhetoric, and the Nordic movement found itself squeezed out.
Eventually, members operated on the periphery of influence, in danger
of harassment by the security forces.?°

Peasantness was linked with the need for a healthy upbringing,
fresh air and exercise, wholemeal bread. It merged oddly with the
spirit of the urban health reform movement of the 1920s, attacked by
Darré in 1931 as ‘romantic’. He started a Peasant University, which
stressed physical fitness. He boasted that the puny and undeveloped
children of agricultural workers became, after a few weeks, healthy
and bright enough to challenge the ‘prevailing cliché of the dumb, fat
and clumsy peasant’ .?° `

But how was the peasant spirit defined? Culture could to some
extent be demonstrated by presenting and analysing peasant artefacts
and customs that existed. The spirit was more difficult to determine,
but to Darré it was everything that was sane, whole, balanced and
healthy. ‘All that I want is to realise the following perception:
Confucius x [times] Lycurgus x Old Rome x Prussianness and the
Nordic Idea equals Germanness.?7

The picturesque nature of this prescription should not obscure the
underlying seriousness—and bleakness—of his commitment to the
restoration, maintenance and increase of the peasantry. His writings on
peasant culture are indeed notable for one omission: they contain litle

The ‘Sign from Thor’

that is sensuous, spiritual or emotional in their appeal, and in this

comparisons with English ruralists of the 1920s and 1930s falter. He
was concerned with the morale and survival of the peasantry. It was
survival or death, for if the peasant went, with him went nation, racial
identity and creativity—in short, history itself. The danger was total:
defence must be absolute, down .to the most minute and particular

detail.

‘LITTLE GERMANY’

A State consists of three things ... a people, their national territory,
and a State authority [Staatsgewalt]. These three ... possess an
internal connection. It is precisely this connection between the
people and its territory and political order that gives that order its
particular characteristics; it is moulded from the organic form of
the people. The character of our State will not be determined by
foreign areas, as occurs in the great colonial Empires—nor through
foreign nations.2®

What did Darré envisage as the ideal Nordic peasant state? How true is
the allegation that it was essentially imperialistic, that “Blood and Soil’,
in Tucholsky’s striking phrase, ‘started Green but became Bloody-
Red’? Later chapters will describe in detail the history of Darré’s efforts
to Oppose imperial expansion in the late 1930s. But this 1935 formula
clearly emphasised the close link between land, culture, people and
State. Ic associated nationhood with the mixing of labour with the land
and had ‘Little Germany’ overtones. While return of Germany’s lost
colonies was never Hitler’s primary aim (continental revision of the
Versailles Treaty came first), there was a sizeable group in the Nazi
leadership, as well as in the more conservative older elements in
Germany, who strongly supported it. The Blood and Soil group
around Darré became noted for its opposition to colonial adventures,
and Darré wrote an introduction to a work called Why Colonies? in
1934, making this point forcibly.2? At this stage it might be useful to
start by looking at a key passage, which appeared first in ‘Attitude and
Task of the Farming Population’, DE, 1930, was reprinted in 1934, but
was deleted in 1940.2°

The article attacked imperial expansion, but considered various
solutions for Germany’s (alleged) overcrowding. Not only did Germany
not have colonies for settlement, but overseas settlements lost touch

The ‘Sign from Thor’

with the homeland, ‘a colossal stupidity from the national biological
standpoint’. Population control was ‘a castration morality’. He urged
instead the reclamation and resettlement of Germany’s old lands in the
Baltic and Poland, the ‘most obvious place’ for a Germany ‘already
embroiled in the Eastern problem’.

Of course, by omitting these words in 1940, Darr& was deliberately
passing up an attempt to align himself with the regime, and instead
disassociated himself from the actual eastward invasion that had taken
place in 1939.

Darré’s attitude, though militant, concentrated on the return of
previously German territory.

The German people cannot avoid coming to terms with [the .
Eastern problem}. The Slavs know what they want—we don’t!
We look on with dumb resignation while formerly purely
German cities—Reval, Riga, Warsaw[sic} and so forth, are lost
to our people. Why shouldn’t other German colonial settlements of
past centuries— Breslau, Stettin, even Leipzig or Dresden—be next in
line? But this would mean submitting to a dangerous error. The
German people cannot avoid a life or death struggle with the
advancing East. Our people must prepare for the struggle ...
only one solution for us, absolute victory! Furthermore, the
concept of Blood and Soil gives us the right to take back as
much Eastern land as is necessary to achieve harmony between the
body of our people and geo-political space. [Darr&'s underlining].?!

It was on this rock—to confine German revisionism to previously
German land—that Darré finally broke. Outside what he deemed to be
German or formerly German territory he wanted no part of territorial
expansion. Hitler, however, had attacked any variant of Internal
Colonisation as pacifist, urging territorial expansion instead.??
Although Darré was not a Baltic German, he shared their feelings about
the German minorities trapped in the newly independent Baltic States,
which, like newly-independent countries everywhere, had turned on
their own minorities, and were in the process of expropriating and/or
expelling them. During his period in Finland and East Prussia, he had
seen something of the problem at first hand. Hitler, as an Austrian, was
attuned to a different set of interests, while the conservative nationalists
of Weimar Germany still longed for the glories of the old Reich.
Edgar Jung, lawyer, and influential author of Herrschaft der
Minderwertigen a member of Othmar Spann’s corporatist and élitist

iaaiiai mare o ee

The ‘Sign from Thor

circle, and friend of von Papen, corresponded with Darré at length on
the future of the Baltic States vis-à-vis Germany. Jung supported a`
‘Greater Germany imperial ideal’, which would incorporate the Baltic
States and various national minorities from Central Europe. He saw the
day of the völkisch nation as over, and attributed problems in the Baltic
States to the problem of ‘hooligan nationalism’ there, among the
Estonians, etc. Darré, however, rejected the power-politics ideal of a
Germany ruling the splintered nations of the North.3?

Given his differences with the neo-conservative intellectuals, and his
attacks on Christianity and the German nobility, it may at first sight
seem surprising that these Catholic intellectuals and nationalist nobles
seemed attracted to, as well as challenged by, his ideas. After all, their
conservative nationalism was a world away from his radical racialism.

The sympathy was due to Darré’s fusion of biologically racialist
ideas with the idealism and voluntarism of Moeller and Spengler,
writers who were not themselves biological racialists. His belief in the
organic link between peasant and soil went further than mechanistic
eugenics. In this, he bridged the mystical fervour of messianic political
thought in Weimar Germany, with the mainstream eugenic and
agrarian reform of the established political parties. His new
contribution was the revolutionary, almost nihilistic radicalism. But it
was expressed in a new and striking way: not in the existentialist
pronouncements of a Moeller, but with the specific, detailed proposals
of the earnest social reformer.34

Furthermore, in his eugenics, Darré was appealing to a movement
which cut across the party political spectrum. There were social
hygienists on Left and Right, besides a fringe of, on the whole, right-
wing racial hygienists. Two prominent members of the Social
Democratic Party, Alfred Ploetz and Grotjahn, were especially
concerned at the genetic implications of the welfare state which they
supported. A eugenics policy was needed as ‘a corrective to the
otherwise inevitable degeneration that would ensue’. The anti-semitic
element seems negligible; many geneticists and eugenicists were of
Jewish origin. The racial hygiene movement was concerned also with
infant health care, abortion, and a variety of problems then considered
hereditary, such as alcoholism and tuberculosis.35

The marriage certificate was first urged by Agnes Bluhm in 1905. As
in Britain, returning armies after the First World War brought back
with them a very high rate of syphilis, and in 1920, the National
Medical Council debated whether to introduce compulsory health

certificates before marriage, this to include an investigation into genetic

The ‘Sign from Thor’

background. Eventually, marriage advice centres were established in
most urban areas, where they offered voluntary counselling on
hereditary problems.?®

Some of Darré’s more extreme proposals, which will be discussed
later, appear less strange in this context. Since eugenics and racial
hygiene are sometimes presented as a specifically German obsession, it
is perhaps worth mentioning that America was the first country to
introduce compulsory sterilisation for hereditary defects in some States,
together with a compulsory venereal disease check before marriage;
that Russia and Sweden started Institutes for Eugenic Research in the
1920s, and that to this day there are several European countries (and

some US States) where a health certificate before marriage is,

compulsory.?7

The winner of the Social Darwinist essay competition of 1900,
Schallmeyer, described himself as a ‘radical democrat’, who wanted to
educate society towards a ‘progressive eugenic awareness’. Fabians in
Britain, including Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb, supported
eugenic action as a progressive, modern measure. So Darré’s intra-racial
eugenics was taken as that of a well-meaning, socially concerned,
compassionate reformer. He was working within an established social
and intellectual framework.3®

Logically, this meant that conservatives often attacked Darré. For
example, in 1939, an Action Frangaise writer criticised Darré’s racial
theories as ‘comic to the highest degree’ and a ‘laboratory experiment’.
He considered it a typical example of Germanic solemnity and excess.

Lenz, however, the progressive eugenicist, approved Darré’s idea of the .

hereditary farm.?°

Darré’s mixture of cogent polemics and scientific fact was useful
propaganda for the committed nationalist movement, and his publisher
made every effort to push the works. They appeared on many a vélkisch
reading list, along with Varuna, Ludendorffs book on the Jesuits,
Maeterlinck, and works on practical astrology.*° Although for the first
two years (1928-30) only 1400 copies were sold, some 150,000 copies
were sold within the decade.*! Darré’s work focused on so many
current controversies, including the existing debate about the meaning
of the concept of race. Vélkisch writers, with their concentration on
anti-semitism, had included cultural, spiritual and religious
determinants. The biological-racial Social Darwinists discussed wider
racial differentiations—negroes, not Jews. Neo-conservative writers
tended to concentrate on the endangered racial élite within a single
population pool. Darré’s own arguments were defensive, but the

The ‘Sign from Thor’

defence was against expected attacks on his ‘materialistic philosophy’,
rather than on his unkindness in thinking in racial terms at all. He saw
his recommendations for sterilisation of those with non-communicable
but hereditary diseases as a kindness, rather than as brutality. He argued
that it would enable the victim to enjoy a normal sex life without

worries about his children’s fate.42

His first book had described the German peasantry, the endangered
life-source of the nation. In his second work, A New Nobility From
Blood and Soil, written at Burg Saaleck between December 1929 and
March 1930, he described in more detail exactly how the new society
would work, and how the new nobility would be formed.

BREEDING A NEW NOBILITY

Racial bodily conformity alone is not enough to mark the State
with the spirit of the predominant race, if a spirit alien to the
race remains predominant in the State. The German State, the
Third Reich which we seek again, cannot be realised just by
selection with a predetermined physical shape for sole aim. For
this reason, we have to instil the real German ideals of the State
into the spirit of future German youth.*?

In order to accomplish this, Darré turned to English education as a
model. He believed that it produced a communal team spirit by
cultivating instinct and social feeling. It emphasised character and team
sports, the principle of ‘government by the governed’. In short, the
main function of education was civic maturity, ‘if we summarise ...
Fichte and Savigny’. German education was founded on ‘the Prussian
barrack system ... In a barracks it is impossible to create the self-
disciplined, self-ruling duties ... It is hierarchically and authoritatively
regimented’. But his support for a self-governing community included
admiration for the military virtues. He praised the teachings of von
Moltke, Scharnhorst and Schlieffen. ‘To them is due the salvage of the
German state from the hands of the assassins and looters in the years
after 1918’, while von Seeckt’s autobiography gave useful advice for
the young; f

The essential thing is action. It has three phases; decision, born

of thought, preparation and action itself. In all three phases the
will directs. The will is born from character. This last is more

The ‘Sign from Thor’

decisive in action than enthusiasm. Spirit without will is
worthless: a will without spirit is dangerous.

Darr& concluded, with enthusiastic eclecticism, “These words of von
Seeckt’s demonstrate the possibility of uniting the educational system
of England and Germany.’**

This criticism of German education differed sharply from the
generally accepted picture, and indeed, from the admiration for
German technical and commercial education, both before the First
World War and since.45 To suggest that German education was too
individualistic is almost as heretical as to suggest that Germany lacked

ruthless efficiency. To ally the criticism of excessive individualism with .

a critique of excessive autocracy, appears to compound the confusion.
Yet there is a connection. Darré saw the mindlessness of the autocratic
hierarchy as encouraging a petty-minded type of competitive striving.
Both qualities were alien to the initiative and intuition he wanted to
inculcate, and the correct educational process could set free the human
will. Indeed, man’s capacity to control the environment, added to
human control of eugenics, could mean that the solution of all social
problems was in sight, given a fully scientific attitude. ‘At the
beginning of all eugenics is the human will,’ he wrote in Eugenics for
the German People (1931). Darré saw the latest advances in knowledge in
the biological sciences as enlarging human freedom by enabling human
material to be manipulated. Research should be left to qualified
experts, but ‘the question, what should one make of the once-and-for-

all given hereditary factors, what is needful and what is unnecessary _

among this genetic pool ... is in the first place a political matter’.

As explained before, Darré alleged a causal relationship between
German ‘peasantness’ and Germany’s national survival and creative
capacity. The new peasant nobility, secure on its inalienable farmstead,
would replace the existing old, worn-out, despised ruling class. It
would also correct the tendency of the ‘best blood’ to die out through
warfare and lower birth-rates. Breeding aims would include bravery,
health and intelligence, and concentrate on the peasant, whose tribal
attitude to family and children had once been instinctive, but which
had been debased through contact with alien, mercantile lifestyles.
Now, a better understanding of Mendelian laws would soon enable the
laws of heredity to be codified, and the ‘genetic inheritance’ which had
ensured centuries of creative achievement, would be preserved.

This argument owed much to the now little known works of
Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, two American writers, who,

i
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The ‘Sign from Thor’

before and immediately after the First World .War, complained that
the Anglo-Saxon element in America was becoming submerged by
non-Anglo-Saxon immigration, and that intra-racial decline was taking
place, the upper classes breeding themselves out, while the ‘Jukes’.
inherited the earth.4® Darré read. of their ideas in Giinther’s Racial History
of the European Peoples (London, 1927). However, Darré laid greater
stress on the role of the human will, which he fused with the belief in
biological determinism. His specific recommendations bore out this
voluntarism. He argued that it was impossible to know whether a
‘rogue gene’ might recur, so any young German who could support a
wife should be able to marry: but his wife’s heredity must be checked.

- State intervention should be confined to investigating the character and

health of young men, and educating them to choose a wife ‘correctly’.
Here, the eugenic role of the woman was seen as more important than
the man’s. The man, the achievement-oriented, voluntarist, creative
element, could prove this worth by achievement and status. The
woman could be gauged only by her child-bearing potential.*7

This argument brought abuse on Darré from all sides. Fellow
Nordicists were often opposed to purposive breeding. Gunther said it
was ‘a chicken-farm mentality’, and it was seen as an attack on family
values. Despite Darré’s stress on the monogamous nature of Nordic
marriage, he was accused of suggesting polygamy. The Young Nordic
League called his proposals ‘unscientific, immoral, an oriental
haremwissenschaft.4® One girl member reproached Rosenberg for
allowing Darré, ‘a man who wrote such an immoral book’, to speak at
a meeting on German culture.49 He managed to annoy men and
women alike by picturing the woman as an equal (if separate) partner,
the adult, healthy, responsible mother. This ideal, with its emphasis on
the natural, and the beauty of womenhood was more attractive to
intelligent women than the depraved and salacious sensuality with
which Zola and Fontane had presented their passive, sofa-lounging
female victims, and was obviously close to the patriotic feminism of
late nineteenth-century Germany. But it also brought him unwelcome
attentions. He complained in 1934 that he had to cope with every kind
of attack, ‘the outbursts of hysterical women, who annex the holy idea
of breeding to. their own lack of erotic restraint.’5° Not only the more
emancipated women attacked him. He shocked a jocular Nazi dinner
party, especially the women guests, into total silence when, after the
birth of his second child, he announced that if the baby had not been
‘all right’, he would have had it exposed.5!

Women were to be classified into four groups: those whose

The ‘Sign from Thor’

marriage was to be encouraged, those whose marriage was merely
permitted, those who could marry but not have children, and those
who must not marry. The latter group included madwomen,
prostitutes and recidivist criminals. Natural children would be assessed
separately .52

Darré stressed his association of the town with miscegenation,

the danger of uncontrolled introduction of inferior blood with
natural children. One thinks of the large towns, where the `
dark-skinned student, the coloured artist, the Jazz trumpeter,
the Chinese sailor, the fruit merchant from Central America,
etc. ... feel perfectly at home, and can often leave. behind an
eternal souvenir.5?

Again, we find a note of fear, a sense of the nation as helpless victim
of the exploiter. What Darré failed to mention here, perhaps because it
was too fresh in his readers’ minds, was the so-called ‘Black Peril’,
Schwarze Gefahr, as the Moroccan and Senegalese troops used by the
French occupying force in the Rhineland were called by völkisch
writers. But he was trying to write moderately and defensively, in
order to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, and also to avoid
recent and limiting historical references to what was meant to be a
scientific programme for social reform. Out, too, went references to
von Seeckt’s role as Freemason, or victim of Freemasons, comments on
the number of top army officers who had Jewish wives, and other
outbursts which appeared in his early letters.54

Darré’s discussion of the mechanism of eugenics implies that he and

his circle had considered the problems involved. How could racial
‘quality’ be defined? Qualities in different races were equal but
different. The problem was to understand the limits of the possible.
Following Günther, but without Giinther’s somewhat joumalistic concept
of the mental qualities of the different races, Darré argued that there
were no completely pure races; that interbreeding had gone on for
hundreds of years in Europe, but that there were pockets of original
peoples here and there, and that Mendelian laws resulted in a
patchwork of different genetic distributions, with one racial type
dominating another, rather than a homogenised ‘melting-pot’. Even if
an individual possessed racial purity, ‘it does not follow that capacity
will effectively manifest itself’. So selection had to continue. for
generation after generation. By selecting desirable genetic combinations
in the children a racial creation would take place. ‘The idea of an

The ‘Sign from Thor’

original race leads to racial chauvinism ... but the idea of eugenics
leads to a normal utilitarianism.’ 55

The ideal of this selective breeding was Nordic man, the long-lost,
half-forgotten progenitor of Germanness, and the Nordic ideal was.
ensconced in the peasantry. But the Nordic race could not be created
Just by exhorting Nordic peasants to have children. Race by itself was
not a sufficiently strong factor to determine the form of the state,
if what existed was alien to the racial spirit. ‘The great currents of
world thought circulate too profoundly.’ Thus, a revolutionary
transformation had to take place in the form of the state before it
could be adapted to the intuitive political ideals of the Volk. Here,

- mechanistic eugenic determinism became subordinated to a more

integrative social philosophy. ‘To the material facts of Race must be
added the consciousness that it must have the kind of conditions that
are proper to it, so that it can really create itself, so that the earth can
be in some way prepared, so that the corn can begin to grow.’56

This apparent dichotomy runs through Darré’s writings on eugenics,
race and the state, and reveals his awareness of factors not amenable to
deterministic analysis. He defined the state as a reflection of the
customs of a homogeneous tribe; but it must also, because of its
capacity for negative and destructive effects on the Volk, play a

` formative role. It was not neutral. The need for identification of people

and state stemmed from this definition. Once fixed in form, states
tended to be invulnerable to pressure from below. So institutions that
did not reflect popular custom and feeling had to be abolished by
force. a

Since his 1933 legislation attempted to put his major ideas into
practice, it is worth looking at Darré’s actual method of racial selection,
once he was given the opportunity. It does seem to demonstrate that a
coercive racial selection was not envisaged, and lends emphasis to the
distinction, drawn earlier, between a defensive intra-racial eugenics,
which aimed to prevent the disappearance of a group, and the
expansionist super-stud mentality popularly associated with Nazis.
Under the Hereditary Farm Law, only farmers of German and ‘similar’
stock, who could prove descent back to 1800, could inherit the
protected farm. To the annoyance of many radical Nazis living in
border areas, this definition included Polish farmers, who were also
enraged at finding their farms rendered not only inalienable but, at one
blow, unsaleable. The nationalist press in Warsaw took up their
cause.5? The SS marriage order, implemented in 1931 by Himmler
with Darré’s help, made SS approval for its marriages a condition of

The ‘Sign from Thor’

membership, ‘solely on grounds of race, or genetic health’. Darré had to
put some pressure on Himmler to get the marriage consent regulation
through, and had wanted a Scandinavian SS to be formed at the same
time, to make it easier for Germans to marry Scandinavians—but
without success. Racial education was part of the curriculum of the
peasant university at Burg Nauhaus and the SS Racial Office (part of
the SS Race and Settlement Main Office). Examples of this work
include a circular sent to the SS education department, suggesting that
a textbook be produced showing photographs of good racial stock.
Darré offered a textbook on horses as an example. SS leaders were
shown films on Blood and Soil, harvesting, ploughing, to persuade
them of the desirable nature of the life.5®

The key point, though, is the voluntary nature of these activities.
Darré did not try to enforce compulsory breeding laws. He did not
incite riots against Poles and Jews and demand the compulsory
sterilisation of the unfit. In fact, he circulated his staff ordering them to
stop boycotts of Jewish shops in 1935.59 He looked to racial education
to create what he called a ‘positive racial consciousness’, rather in the
way in which today, especially in the USA but to some ‘extent in
England, television and other media make special efforts to present the
black minority in a favourable light in drama series, children’s
Programmes, and so on, Darré wanted farmers and their families to be
educated into racial consciousness White is Beautiful— s part of a
process of instilling a sense of identity. It was seen as a rescue operation
“ “fora vanishing breed. Even the SS marriage laws could be breached
without serious sanction, since dismissal from the SS (a volunteer
group) was not in the 1930s the end of the world.

Once a breeding pool of Nordic peasants had been achieved,
leaders would emerge, chosen on grounds of ability. They would form
a Chamber of Nobles. This ‘nobility by recognition’ was Darré’s
attempt to overcome what he saw as a problem in meritocracy. He
thought that in the long-run, meritocracy damaged society, by
draining the lower classes of their more able individuals. It failed, too,
to ensure the continuation of the valuable genetic inheritance of
individuals who proved their worth. But a principle of merit would
underlie the hereditary nobility. The brave would be acclaimed by
their peers, chosen to fight and lead. The ideal nobility was
unprivileged, dutiful, hard-working and worthy of its status: Darré
referred to Plato’s Guardians here. The nobility would be intimately
connected with the ruled. To avoid deracination, the nobility would
remain part of the peasantry, and lead a farmer’s life. Only in this way

The ‘Sign from Thor’

could the inner intuition necessary to rule be. maintained, and caste
distinctions avoided. Such distinctions ‘conserve, they do not create’.©°

This criticism tellingly displays his lack of conservative orthodoxy,
which traditionally seeks order and continuity, as opposed to.
spontaneity and radical reassessment. His criticism of capitalist
meritocracy clearly had something in common with that of Weber and
Pareto, and recognised the problem of a non-egalitarian society, where
classes lose their natural leaders. But his attempt to combine stability,
justice and flexibility in his ideal society was drawn more from a
private vision of an ideal, tribal society (though one, apparently, shared
by the Nuremberg trial judge, who criticised Darré for not realising
that true democracy was invented by primitive German tribes, ‘long
before there were any Jews there’). The identification of cultural and
racial factors formed a self-correcting circular system: if a Nordic race
could be re-created, it would govern according to old Nordic ways,
providing that existing institutions were abolished. Peasant intuition,
wisdom and the mutual recognition accorded by independent freemen,
would ensure harmony and good sense.

This ideal was not Utopian, a description that implies the argument
that, if the laws of nature could be abolished or transcended, man
would be better or happier. The argument was rather that, if man

` lived according to the laws of nature, becoming aware intuitively of

his links with the world around him, he would be better and happier.
The attempt to escape from these bonds could only fail, and lead to a
cycle of industrial growth, collapse and misery.

The vision of the Nordic peasant soul portrayed. by Darré was
ambiguous. The peasant was strong, the source of all productiveness
and creativity. But he was also fragile; his soul could not survive cities,
capitalism or industrialisation. Darré was driven by his fear for the
Nordic peasant, yet his political support was attracted by his projection
of its strength. The defensive, racial element later became lost in
ministerial practice, in exchange for pursuit of peasant productive
potential.

During Darré’s early years in office as a minister, close friends and
backers absorbed his view of the peasant as inherently vital; the source
of national health, fertility and creativity. This eventually mutated into
the belief that. the creative, entrepreneurial smallholder could contribute
to, and co-exist with, industrial society. His belief in the sensitivity of
the Nordic soul, its endangered quality, was abandoned by others,
including some of his followers. .

In any case, a serious contradiction remained in his fusion of

The ‘Sign from Thor’

spiritual and racial elements. He argued that peasant cultural
continuity, the living tradition, was lost in urbanisation. But he also
argued that peasantness was genetically inherent in the Nordic people.
If this was so, then there was no reason why ‘sound Nordic stock’
could not be rescued from the towns and returned back to the land.
By arguing that peasantness could not re-emerge from submergence in
town life, he subordinated his. racialist argument to his concept of
spiritual peasantness, and, by inference, wrote off the 70% urban
population of Germany. This was not an ‘unworldly’ tangent to his
philosophy, but an essential part of it. Whether in fact he would have
carried out his beliefs is open to considerable doubt. Just as, when it

came to the crunch, he was unable to bring himself to exclude peasants _

of Jewish ancestry from the Hereditary Farm Law, it seems most
unlikely that he would have excluded all townsmen in practice.

It is probably apparent from the foregoing discussion, that Darré
was a strange mixture of visionary and realist. He used his selected
scientific arguments, learned references and agricultural knowledge in
pursuit of a goal whose nature was extremely radical, even in those
days of ferment. He saw the re-ruralisation of Germany as the only
viable alternative to inevitable national destruction. The next chapter
will discuss how he came to think, mistakenly, that Hitler’s movement
towards the peasant vote in 1930 was his opportunity to carry out his
aims. Darré was, indeed, to storm his way to an invincible position in
agrarian circles, through the optimism, passion and energy produced
by this conviction, and was to obtain ministerial office. Hitler found
Darré a useful theorist and organiser for a period of crisis, but when

Darré kept faith with his own vision, he was, like many other

revolutionary ideologues, discarded.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Conspiracy

Blood and Soil is regarded today as one of the fundamental elements
of Nazi ideology, and Darré is seen as a standard National Socialist
ideologue. How did he come to enter politics, and how was it that he
became an activist in the NSDAP? In many ways, Darré does not fit
the Reichsleiter type. He joined the Party late, in May 1930; he was
from a once wealthy, upper middle-class background, and he had no
background as a party political activist, despite his brief membership of
the DVFP in 1923.

He had become acquainted during the late 1920s with National
Socialist activists and sympathisers, most of them living in Thuringia,
and interested in two things; peasant-agrarian problems and the decline
of German culture. He knew Theo Habicht, and Habicht was Gauleiter
of Wiesbaden in 1928 before going to Vienna. Habicht also knew
Himmler, and was a Party speaker. Darré kept in touch with him after
his first meeting with Hitler. Darré stayed with Schultze-Naumburg on
and off, between 1928 and 1930.1 As mentioned earlier, Schultze-
Naumburg was a respected architect, who had been a leader of the
progressive movement before 1914. His country house was a centre of
party activity as well as a meeting place for Nordic Ring sympathisers.
There, Darr& met Hans Holfelder, a NSDAP member who infiltrated
the Artamanen group in 1927, and died violently in 1929 and to whose
memory he dedicated New Nobility. He also met various neo-
conservative intellectuals there. He knew Hans Johst, playwright and
author of a popular work on Schlageter, met Jünger and, later,
Heidegger. He was befriended in 1929 by Dr Hans Severus Ziegler,
editor of the Thuringian NSDAP Gau newspaper. Ziegler, one of the
radical peasant ideologues of the circle, admired Darré’s work, and
wanted him to work for him as a journalist and political organiser.
Darré also met Giinther at Saaleck, in January 1929 after three years of
correspondence. Konopath was a frequent visitor, and joined the Party
shortly after Darré.?

Despite these contacts, Darré did not join the NSDAP until he was
offered a post within it, and his approach seems to have been almost
subversive. Despite his strongly nationalist feelings in the early 1920s,

The Conspiracy

Darré’s main interest by this stage was the plight of the peasantry. He
had tried to found a ‘Union of Noble German Peasants’ in 1928, with
Dr Horst Rechenbach, later to liaise between Darré and the SS Race
and Settlement Main Office; but it foundered in the agricultural
depression.? Darré now got together with Kenstler, editor of Blood and
Soil, to organise and finance a ‘nationwide network of cells among
radically-minded peasants’, and is supposed to have asked Ziegler to
finance the idea, but had first thought of approaching Hugenberg, the
head of the German Conservative Nationalist Party, for finance and
help for a political agrarian organisation: his publisher, Lehmann,
persuaded him that it would be a waste of time, and suggested that
Hitler might be more interested in the idea.* This suggests that Darré
was looking for a party to carry out his programme, a political
machine to infiltrate for his own views, rather than entering the
NSDAP as a committed loyalist.

In 1930, the NSDAP agricultural manifesto appeared, designed to
appeal to the farming vote. The authorship of the manifesto is not
known for certain—indeed, for decades it was assumed that Darré had
written it, but according to Erwin Metzner, Keeper of the Seal to the
National Peasant Council, it was produced by Konstantin Hierl, head
of the NSDAP Department II (Labour) and Himmler, though Gregor
Strasser, Feder, Kenstler himself, and Werner Willikens have also been
put forward as possible authors.? In many ways it foreshadowed later
Nazi policy, calling for hereditary, inalienable farms, and debt relief,
but there were references to the need for unity between town and
country, the desirability of industrial development in the east German
provinces, which Darré and his circle could not have approved. The
manifesto was openly a party political document, and emphasised
national and infrastructural economic aims as well as agricultural
reforms. When Darré first read the manifesto, he was interested enough
to copy it down word for word.® Despite their reservations, he and
Kenstler were struck by the document’s opportune appearance, and
decided that it offered potential for their own plans. There is an
undated document in the archives of the NSDAP Agricultural Office,
obviously by Darré, which was written for Hitler some time between
1930 and 1933, and which discusses the possibility of a peasant coup, to
be carried out by force against Germany’s big cities. This may have
been Darré’s first offering to Hitler in 1930.”

The correspondence between Darré and Kenstler was couched in
conspiratorial terms, using hints and initials. On April 12th, 1930,
Darré wrote, i

The Conspiracy

What I wanted to say is this: if at all possible, I would like to
spend the Easter holiday at Wiesbaden with my wife; however,
would make {that} dependent on the state of our affairs; if, for
example, H. Munich [Adolf Hitler} should come to Weimar
during this period, obviously I don’t go. Concerning the
agricultural programme of the NSDAP, I should not express an
opinion on it at this preliminary stage for tactical reasons.
Perhaps we will be able to broach the subject in a different
way, which I think would be more sensible in view of the
different situation. In any case, I could discuss the ... details
with you verbally as soon as possible.®

The Schultze-Naumburgs were acquainted with Hitler through the

Bruckmanns, the Munich publisher. First Frau Bruckmann, then the
architect, told him about their clever young friend, with his
knowledge of farming and organisational capacities. The idea was now
to find Darré a post in Thuringia, so that he could work with Ziegler
and Schultze-Naumburg. Darré wrote to his wife on 27th March 1930
that Ziegler and Kenstler planned an agricultural policy institute, under
his leadership, to be financed by the NSDAP, and that direct
negotiations were under way with Hitler.? While his was angling for a
meeting with Hitler, he learnt that the lack of anti-semitism in his two
books had attracted unfavourable comment from Hitler.

Today I received a long letter from Sch-N. who was at
Bruckmanns [the publisher had social-political ‘evenings’, where
Hitler would meet Bavarian society] together with A.H. on
Wednesday evening. Result: A.H. had virtually no idea what
was intended for me. He did know my name, but not my
Bauerntum, which he had only heard about. A lively debate
developed between A.H. and Sch.N. which, however, was
fruitless, insofar as A.H. was not properly aware of what I was
after, and Sch.-N, was not the most suitable representative,
because he lacked knowledge of basic agricultural principles.
Also, A.H. had been falsely informed over my Bauerntum,
insofar as he believed that I didn’t sufficiently interpret the
Jewish problem in terms of their parasitical essence. Briefly and
clearly, you can see from these few indications how things
stand.?°

Darré went on to say that Hitler was clearly interested in meeting him
personally.

The Conspiracy

On 7th May 1930, he wrote to Ziegler that ‘Frau Sch-N.’ was
making arrangements to catch Hitler ‘for a couple of hours or for a
weekend’ through Frick. At this stage, his publisher, Lehmann, wrote
offering to pay him 600 marks a month if he would work for the
NSDAP in Munich as their agricultural organiser. The letter still exists,
though ironically enough Darré’s account of his recruitment to the
NSDAP, with his salary paid by outside sources, was not believed by
his U.S. Army interrogator, in 1945.1!

Ziegler was dismayed at the prospect of losing Darré to the Brown
House. A letter to Hess, refusing the post, was drafted, but not sent
after a phone call from Hess himself.1? Darré took up his activity for

the Nazi Party in June 1930, his salary paid for by his publisher, and .

possibly other private sources. One writer suggests that a small Munich
industrialist, Pietzsch, also financed Darré’s salary.'? Lehmann’s
intervention over the salary suggests a certain ambiguity in Darre’s
position. Although Lehmann, who died in 1935, was the only neo-
conservative publisher who continued unhampered by the Nazis after
1933, the fact that he virtually bought Darré’s way into the NSDAP
gives some idea of the extent to which Darré must have been seen as an
outsider.14 The idea that Darré was soft on the Jews did not help, and
he never became one of the favoured inner circle around Hitler. His
party number was high, around 250,000. He was one of the very few
late party members to achieve high office.

Darré took up his post in June 1930. He moved to Munich with
Charly, whom he married in 1932. Saaleck was still a centre for what

was now avowedly Nazi activity, and in mid-June he returned there _

for a conference with Goebbels, Frick, Goering, Rosenberg, von
Schirach, Giinther and Konopath. Konopath became a member of the
Race and Culture department of the NSDAP Dept. 11.13 Eventually,
co-operation languished between him and Darré, who discarded first
Schultze-Naumburg then Konopath, as his interests shifted more and
more to agricultural problems, and away from the Nordic movement.
‘Keep Paulchen out of Party disputes, he would only get them back to
front’, he wrote, of the ageing architect.1© He wrote to Nordic Ring
members apologising for delayed letters, and saying that agricultural
problems left him no time for the Nordic Ring. Konopath sank into
obscurity, and in 1932 his magazine, Die Sonne, was taken over by the
Skald, a secret vélkisch order of elitist, revolutionary principles, which
will be discussed in the next chapter.!?

He missed Saaleck, but there were compensations in Munich, such as

u
|

The Conspiracy

evenings spent with the Bruckmanns, and Darré remarked with awe

that ‘In this very house Houston Stewart Chamberlain stayed ...’ an
indication as to how strongly Chamberlain: was admired among the
National Socialists.1®

His contacts with Hitler in the Brown House in Munich were few,
and he was obviously in awe of him. ‘Even I, as his adviser, can
scarcely get to see him,’ he noted, and told inquirers who wanted to
contact Hitler to first make contact with Frau Bruckmann instead.!?
One letter to his ex-wife was written on notepaper headed with an
imprinted picture of Hitler, presumably standard issue for top Party
members. Other letter-headings included pictures of the Deutsche Eck

` in Coblenz, and the Sans-Souci orangerie in Potsdam. He referred to

the ‘atmosphere of the leader, of leadership’ in another letter explaining
that he was too busy to keep up his private correspondence.2° These
letters, though, seldom included comments on politics. When they did,
they had that lecturing, didactic and public tone which Darré was prone
to adopt with his first wife. He told her one anecdote about Hitler and
Hindenburg which sheds some light on the NSDAP reaction to
Hindenburg’s refusal to appoint Hitler as Chancellor after the 37.4%
Nazi vote in July 1932. Hitler had been sent damaging material about
Hindenburg, which he had refused to use. The result was that ‘the

Jesuit Brüning’ gave Hindenburg ‘dictatorial powers’ [when Hindenburg

became Chancellor] and Hitler’s head could be ‘on the block’ at any
moment. The lesson he drew was that ruthlessness was necessary in
politics.2!

Most of his letters concerned his daughter, Didi, of whom he was
very fond, and complaints about money worries (in September. 1932,
Reichsleiter salaries were halved, and payment was often delayed).22
Darré, despite his formal, inflexible bearing, loved children, and they
always responded to his sensitive and perceptive approach to them.
One visit from Didi had to be put off because of an election campaign
in north Germany and there were problems with others, because of
Darré’s occasionally homeless state. He moved from furnished flat to
furnished flat, occasionally staying with friends, while paying half his
salary over to Alma (a situation which continued until she married
again). Despite financial problems, and the embarrassment of acquiring
a new, pretty and younger wife with no home to take her to, he felt
relief at the separation. He asked Lehmann for money to help pay for
the divorce. Lehmann, who admired Alma’s strength of character, was
shocked at the separation, but Darré insisted to him that he could not
have carried on his political work with her, and needed to break free.2?

The Conspiracy

Darré continued his weekly letters to his ex-wife until he learned
that his daughter had contracted tuberculosis and needed expensive
hospital treatment. He wrote an unpleasant letter to Alma, accusing her
of neglecting Didi, and demanding that she pay the medical costs.
While it is always difficult to judge ex-marital quarrels from the
outside, his attitude here seems appalling, and understandably enough,
Alma broke off the ‘deep and warm friendship’ that Darré had vowed
in mid-June, 1930. Oddly enough, he seemed proud of the letter, and
kept several copies of it in his files, although it clearly showed the
frantic anger of a man under stress.2*

THE BROWN HOUSE 1931-1933

Given Darré’s interest in corporatism, one would have expected
some degree of sympathy between him and other early Nazi theorists,
such as Feder and Otto Strasser. However, he regarded Feder as too
urban-oriented, and Strasser as an incipient Bolshevik. One of his early
diary entries refers to the ‘rather Communistic impression’ made by
Strasser’s black Russian smock and red shirt.25 Strasser’s corporatism,
however, did stress “Germanic self-determination’ rather than the
‘Fascist satrapy’, and Darré later found more in common with Gregor
Strasser, head of the Party’s Agricultural Organisation until Darré took
over.2® Strasser told Lehmann that Darré was ‘doing first class work’.
Darré described Strasser as ‘with the right ideas, very clever, but
generally not easy to handle ... Once you win him over, he’s a

powerful ally’. The relationship became more difficult as a row |

developed between Strasser and Hitler, which ended in Strasser’s
resignation. 27

He made a good impression on men like Otto Wagener, ex-
General Staff Captain, corporatist and follower of Feder, who
Himmler told of Darré’s ‘wide knowledge of the world’ and
agricultural expertise.28 Darré’s Neuadel, more readable and polemical
than the earlier Das Bauerntum, was a good introduction to these Nazi
circles. His views on land division and settlement appealed to the
‘urban’ Nazis because of their implicit hostility to conservatives and
land-owners. The young Heinz Haushofer, son of General Karl
Haushofer, was taken to meet Darré and Hess in Munich in late 1930,
and was struck by Darré’s ideas and interest in the now-neglected
Gustav Ruhland.?® The agrarian adviser to the Pan-German League,
von Herzberg, visited Lehmann and asked to see Darré, and Class,
author of pre-war nationalist best-seller, If I were Emperor, head of the

The Conspiracy

Pan-German League, also wanted to meet him. Ernst Hanfstaengl,
script-writer with UFA and old friend of Hitler’s, insisted on reading
New Nobility before visiting England, in case he was asked about it by
the English press. Altogether, Darré had become a major figure in
radical nationalist circles.3°

But what lay behind Hitler’s sudden need for an agricultural

expert? Why did he think the German farmer was ready to vote for

the Nazis? How committed was Darré to the Nazi Party, and why did
he think his plans for a peasant rebellion belonged there? How true
was Darré’s later claim that his usefulness to Hitler gave him more
independence than the other Reichsleiters?

German agriculture is widely seen as split into two extremes, the
small peasant farm, and the Junker landowner. This picture is
exaggerated, as the typical Junker farm was about 1000 Ha. in size, and
much of that would be barely usable. In short, the Junker ‘latifundia’
were more the size of a substantial tenant farm in England than the
Scottish landowner’s 20,000 acres, and changed hands more often,
showing greater social mobility than England’s landed élite, according
to a recent study.3! The apparently inefficient small peasant farm had
shown surprising growth potential between 1880 and 1925, indeed, at a
time of agricultural depression, this sector had grown more than any

‘ other.” In many ways, the small farm was more resistant to

depression, economic controls and inflation than the heavily mortgaged
large farm. In 1914, some 30% of Germany’s population still lived on
the land. The east Elbian Junkers usually farmed their farms
themselves, and in many ways had more in common>.with the small
farmer than either had with the large estates of the south-west, often
the remnants of Holy Roman Empire holdings. However, the Junkers
had considerable political power. They presented themselves as the
backbone of the nation, and attracted subsidies and other protective
measures which sometimes affected small farmers badly. Political
divisions, as represented in the farming organisations, were minimal, and
essentially, both groups wanted protection from marketing problems.
One potential source of political divergence lay in the fact that peasant
areas of Germany, such as the Rhineland and Bavaria, had a large Catho-
lic population, and Catholic peasants tended to vote for the Centre
Party, while larger farmers voted for the DNVP conservatives.

There was one substantial group that fitted into neither category,
the small-medium farmers of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein.
Here, the land was fertile and intensively farmed, and productivity per

hectare in Lower Saxony was higher than anywhere else. The inflation

The Conspiracy

of 1923 was more damaging to this category than to the heavily
mortgaged large farm, whose debts were in some cases wiped out. The
boom of 1925, fuelled by short-term American investment, encouraged
the most advanced farmers in north and north-west Germany to
expand. Dairying and market gardening thrived on the heavy black
soils of German Frisia. The ‘Red Earth’ settlement associations of
Westphalia bought up land at high prices for smallholdings. But these
areas were trapped by the Depression of 1928 which pre-dated the
crash of 1929. High levels of debt combined with a drop in food prices
and very high taxation levied by the Social Democratic Prussian
parliament to pay for urban workers’ social welfare. Of course, all
German agriculture was affected, but the farmers of north and north-
west Germany, traditionally liberal voters, felt especially penalised.
They had been exhorted to invest and expand, and were now going
bankrupt, where ‘dog and stick’ farmers had kept their heads down
and kept their farms.??

By early 1928 nearly half Germany’s farms were making a loss.
Average profit levels had dropped to a mere eight marks per hectare,
while taxes and other government burdens amounted to an average 26
marks per hectare. In some cases, interest rates were 10% (a real
interest rate of c.7%).?* The result was a spate of bankruptcies and
foreclosures. Large farms were reduced rather than affected, because in
an emergency it was possible for them to sell off some land, though
there was deep psychological resistance to splitting up estates.75

This agricultural emergency resulted in sporadic armed resistance
on the part of the farmers, which nearly led to civil war. Farmers
bombed tax offices, and shot off rifles at foreclosure auctions. These
‘protesters’ were often the best educated and most widely travelled.
Unlike the peasants who had exploded in eastern Europe in the 1920s,
they found an ideology ready and waiting in neo-conservative
radicalism. Prussian intellectuals and ex-Fretkorps activists like von
Salomon poured in to help, with the impassioned patriotism of the
beleaguered minority, rather than the confidence of the powerful.
Unlike the East Prussian grain growers, the north German small
farmers were outsiders; they failed to fit the numerous interest group
structures, and had the worst of all worlds as a result of the existing
system of taxation and subsidies. In English terms, they were more like
the Northern Irish, or Anglo-Welsh farmers, than like the East Anglian
arable farmers, who had always had the ear of the Conservative Party.
The black flag of revolt was raised in Schleswig-Holstein, its symbol a
plough and a sword. One popular song of the movement began,

The Conspiracy

I put a bomb in the tax office,
and dynamite in the county parliament,

phrases which are catchier in German.3& The refrain of the song called
to Hitler, Ludendorff, Erhardt and Hugenberg for aid, a more eclectic

group, in party-political terms, than might at first appear.

National Socialist attacks on finance capitalism and Jewish
speculation were willingly accepted by men who saw creditors, banks
and international commodity markets as the root of their problems.
The Narodnik streak in the German Youth Movement supported the
attacks on tax officials and bureaucrats. The ruling Weimar coalition
saw nothing to be gained by subsidising these traditionally liberal men,
while the DNVP was more concerned with subsidies for powerful
agricultural producer groups. The protest movement was crushed by
heavy prison sentences in 1930. Ironically, this destruction of violent
and anarchic action left the way open to the ‘infiltration and
propaganda devised by Darré. Now revolutionary action had failed, the
farmers turned to a legitimate party that took their grievances
seriously. The emotional Anabaptisrn which had underlain 1848 almost
as much as the Peasants’ War of 1525 welcomed the outspoken attacks
on large landowners, banks and freemasons. Darré was not a brilliant

' orator, but he offered the promise of restitution to the disinherited, and

future security. His speeches stressed the national importance of the Bauer,
and the programme carefully worked out by him and his staff over the
the next two years corresponded to the perceived problems of the time.

Hitler’s need for the rural vote was based on a shortfall in the 1930
vote, although this was sharply increased from the mere 2.6% of the
vote in the 1928 national election to 18.3%. Hitler realised he would
have to increase the party’s attraction to new groups. The Protestant
small farmers were an obvious choice, disaffected, nationalist,
radicalised, and split geographically between support for the
conservatives and for the Liberal Party. Unlike the Catholic farmers,
they had no party devoted to their own interests. There was a
remarkable disparity in Nazi support between Catholic and Protestant
small farmers, 73.9% in Protestant areas, to 12.3% in Catholic areas.??
This was due,. not to sectarian appeals in or from the party, but to the
fact that the largely Catholic Centre Party already occupied Nazi
ground in many ways. It was devoted to peasant interests, anti-big
business, anti-big trade unions, covertly anti-semitic, anti-Communist,
and had strong regional loyalties. The Nazi Party was a peasant party
in Protestant areas, but a proletarian party in Catholic areas.

The Conspiracy

In June 1930, Darré organised a sub-division of the: NSDAP
Department 2 (Labour) into the Agricultural Organisation, a quasi-
independent network of activists, and sympathisers, whose task was not
only to infiltrate the farmers and peasants unions by electoral means
but to discuss land reform, agricultural improvement, structural
changes in tenure and other issues. He kept their activity moving
through a daily stream of memoranda and orders. Most of these
memoranda still survive, and offer a detailed picture of the way in
which National Soctalists organised their recruitment and propaganda
activity.?® Unlike many other departments, Darré’s agricultural
department in these early days did not waste time and energy in in-
fighting. His leadership was accepted from the start, and it was
recognised that few others could have shown the same combination of
expert knowledge, nationalist reliability, organisation and hard work.
One post-war author refers to the ‘exceptional organisational and
tactical abilities’ of the ‘National Socialist cadres’? He made a good
impression on his fellow Nazis at this time, especially those below the
rank of Reichsleiter, precisely because he was not an ‘old fighter’ but an
outsider. He came from a higher social background than many old
Nazis, and this again helped him in the first few years, when non party
political support was especially welcome to men who had been
virtually full-time political activists since the war. Such activists, aware
of the isolated nature of their lives, always see new blood as a
breakthrough, a sign that they are beginning to win over ‘the others’.
Darré belonged to a traditionally Lberal family background, the
wealthy merchant with overseas connections, and so represented a
particularly unusual type of recruit. Hitler Regiert, a hagiographic
portrayal of the Reichsleitung written in 1933, laid great stress on Darré’s
elegant appearance, his good looks, his well cut suit and polished
manners, to an extent which shows how useful he was to the party’s
image.*°

Darré did not always reciprocate, and in the early days in the
Brown House, some enmities were instant and mutual. ‘Goebbels hates
me,’ he noted in his diary. ‘It must be because of his black blood’, a
double edged crack at Goebbels’ dark colouring and his Catholicism.*!
Within a few months, Princess zur Lippe was complaining that
Goebbels had given widespread publicity to a pamphlet attacking ‘the
racial work of our friends’ [i.e. Darré], expressing not only personal
animosity, but a deep dislike of Blood and Soil concepts. Darré told
Konopath that Goebbels did not understand ‘scientific racial concepts’,
and hoped to use him in the Propaganda department to combat

The Conspiracy

~ Goebbels’ influence. Darré managed to win control of the AD journal

Landpost from Goebbels’ propaganda department. He also warned
Konopath about Himmler. ‘Many people laugh at him, but his
influence over Hitler is greater than people realise.’ 42

The Gauleiters, mostly old party members, were jealous of the
independent nature of the Agricultural Department (or AD), and
Darré’s direct responsibility to Hitler. Darré had made this independence
a precondition of his work. He was in a strong position, not only
because the party needed his combination of expertise and
organisational ability, but because Hitler had taken the initiative in
approaching and recruiting him. In January 1934, the Reichsnahrstand, or
National Food Estate, the new marketing corporation, was again
formally promised independence from the Party and direct
responsibility to Hitler.*? Darré established an area network that
paralleled that of the NSDAP. One report on the structure of the
Agricultural Department in Saxony, demonstrates the similarity.44
There was an expert adviser at Gau level, and 34 at Kreis level. 1100
NSDAP farmer members were active at farm and village level.
Twenty-two party members were representatives in the Chamber of
Agriculture. There were 40 speakers who specialised on farming and
party matters, while Saxony AD had sent four members to the State

‘and National Parliament. From the Gauleitung point of view, much of

this effort could have been better used in strictly Party matters. In the
early 1930s, the situation was accepted because it was recognised that
Hitler needed to capture the rural vote if the NSDAP was to win an
election. But by January 1933 the party was in a stronger position, and
the Gauleiter of Saxony ordered the Saxony AD to reduce its strength
by 33%, allegedly to save money, but in fact to stave off AD
competition. Riecke, a Gau adviser on agriculture (i.e., a member of
the NSDAP organisation), who was later to be second-in-command
under Herbert Backe, Darré’s successor, wrote dismissively in his
memoirs of Darré’s ‘Blood and Soil efforts ... The Westphalian
peasants, among whom I worked, had quite different worries’.*5
Riecke was dismissed as agricultural adviser after 1933, and worked for
the volunteer labour force thereafter.

Where the AD broke new ground, and began to approximate to the
planned farmer’s corporation, was in its system of expert advisers.
There were nine such experts in Saxony alone, each with an area of
expertise, such as market gardening, agricultural co-operatives,
settlement, and fowls. They were accompanied by seven more advisers

The Conspiracy

on general peasant affairs, such as education, debt and appropriation
problems, and insurance. Darré insisted that all agricultural experts had
to be farmers. Party members were trained in special courses laid on
by the AD. In one such series, five local areas trained 700 members on
how to become elected to positions in the agricultural unions, such as
the Landbund, how to recruit peasants in small villages, how to speak at
public meetings and how to write letters on political subjects to the
local newspapers.** The intensely regional nature of Germany’s
political life and press meant that each area needed to produce its own
propaganda, quickly, flexibly and effectively, so that local issues could
be used where necessary. The Saxony report estimated that some
18,000 to 19,000 letters, cards and pamphlets were produced between
January 1932 and January 1933, while 50 directives were sent round
internally. All areas were canvassed at least once, even the most
remote, and meetings were well attended by peasants, usually between
130 to 400. Darré quickly became a popular speaker, not so much for
thetoric and bonhomie as for content. The German farmer was a
political animal, already organised into various farmers’ unions, and
producer co-operatives, and it was easier to reach a politicised group
than it would have been to start from scratch. In December 1931,
Werner Willikens, one of the AD’s leading members, was elected
president of the Landbund, a major success for the AD.*?

In July 1932, Hitler’s Party attracted the largest vote it was to have
before gaining power, 37.4% of the vote. In a system of multiple
minority parties, it was an overwhelming victory. The north German
Protestant farmers and village and small towns had voted for Hitler—
averaging some 78.8%. In some areas in the Geest, Nazi votes were
80-100% of the total.4® The smaller the village, the larger the
proportion. As a reward, Hitler told Darré he might be offered the
Prussian Agricultural Ministry if the NSDAP came to power. At this
stage, Darré was not expecting a position in the national govern-
ment.49

He insisted that special attention be paid to the agricultural co-
operatives, especially the Raiffeisen ones, because they were completely
independent of state finance. One AD member reported in February
1933 that over 40,000 co-operatives were represented in the Raiffeisen
group. “With a few exceptions, the whole farming population is
organised in co-operatives or societies and is bound to one or more.’5°
The implications of this fact for the proposed new marketing
corporation were considerable. It meant that much of the basic
groundwork was already done, that farmers were psychologically

The Conspiracy

attuned to protection against market fluctuations, and to the idea of
cutting out the marketing middleman: further, that a pool of
experienced administrators already existed.

AD activists were helped in their organising by the fact that there
was general agreement about the failure of the market economy in
agriculture. The only question was how should it be reformed. The
activists went as far as opposing leasehold tenure. Instead of seeing
tenancies as a means by which the young farmer could make a start,
and the smallholder extend or diminish his holding according to
market conditions, they opposed the renting of land as a capitalist
phenomenon, an unwanted intrusion of the mercantile world. This, if
Darré’s plans were to be implemented, had serious implications for the
land market. In 1925, 12.6% of all agricultural land in Germany was
rented, and 67% of farms between two and five hectare.5! The
quickest and simplest way for farmers to expand was to increase the
amount of land rented on a full- or part-time basis, but the agricultural
depression of the late 1920s reduced the proportion of rented farmland,
and in 1933, only ten per cent of farmland was rented. The
development of leasehold tenure came under attack from a range of
political groups, although the Weimar Constitution of 1919 had
granted tenant farmers considerable security of tenure. Both the SPD

‘and the DNVP objected to cost-effective and profit-oriented farming

in principle. For the SPD land reformers, followers of Henry George,
leasehold tenure represented the exploitation of the peasantry. They
supported land nationalisation, or at the very least, the nationalisation
of rent.5? For the German conservatives, it increased ‘the danger of
splitting up the large estates, and loss of control over land use. The
concept of the peasant as a profit-making businessman, able to buy and
sell his land at will, was opposed to all Darré and his staff stood for.
They attacked the concept as an inheritance of nineteenth-century
liberalism. According to them, it took an atomised, individualistic view
of the farmer, who became merely part of a mercantile ethic. For the
Nazi agrarian radicals, the small farm was the core of the nation,
crucial to its physical, moral, cultural and racial health. As the source
of the nation’s vitality, the small farmer could not be left to suffer
under market forces.

Darré also attracted intellectual support from thosé who supported
the peasantry for quite other reasons. One school of thought saw small
farms as more productive, in terms of net deliveries per hectare, than
large ones.53 There was resentment against subsidised competition from

large landowners, and especially the unpopular Osthilfe, a special

The Conspiracy

subsidy to east Elbian grain growers. The peasant was. doubly the
victim, paying taxes to support the subsidies, and having to pay more
for his fodder. The AD under Darré reviled large land-owners as
‘bacon-tariff patriots’, and he gleefully circulated their counter-attacks,
accusing him of being worse than the KPD.°4

The AD’s attack on leasehold tenure was accompanied by the
demand to settle farmers on inalienable medium-sized farms. The
campaign to win over the peasant and small farmer was helped by

Darré’s opposition to the large landowner. Darré’s friend Theo Habicht

published Deutsche Latifundia in 1928, a book which attacked large
landholdings, and Darré used his figures in his 1930 New Nobility.55 The
AD was united in support of a programme which would divide up the

great estates. This did not attract as much opposition as one might °

expect from large landowners, since many were demoralised and
uncertain of their future, while others supported the idea of peasant
settlement on nationalist grounds. As long ago as the late 1890s, the
chairman of the Agrarian League had called for state intervention—if
necessary, by nationalisation—to prevent the dismemberment of estates
in private hands.5¢ However, at this time, some of the large farmers
began to realise the implications of the state aid they had been
requesting (and receiving) for decades, and began to move towards a
stronger view of property rights.5? The German conservative party
saw Darré as a dangerous radical, which of course, he was, especially to
their interests, and any attacks by landowners were proudly circulated
to the members of the AD. One anti-Nazi landowner, Prince zu
Lowenstein, in an article called ‘The Radicalised Village’, claimed that
thirteen million small farmers had been won over to Hitler. ‘A pre-
condition of winning the fight against National Socialism is to ...
ensure that Communism doesn’t fill the vacuum left by Right-
radicalism.’58

There were signs that, in their desperation, farm-workers in East
Prussia were voting for the Communist Party, and Darré, after
commissioning a report on the economic situation of state domaines in
East Prussia, sent in a team to win the tenant farmers over from the
German Nationalist Party.°° While General Schleicher, the ‘Socialist
General’ who was shot in 1934, was flinging subsidies around in wild
abandon to the Bavarian egg producers, the grain growers of East
Prussia, and the dairy operatives of Lower Westphalia, telegrams began
to land on his desk about the fact that farmers were oscillating between
the KPD and the NSDAP.®°

During this period, arguments about peasant productivity had

The Conspiracy

developed controversial political overtones. Support for the large
landowners was linked to the DNVP, the heavy industrial sector, and
an ad hoc interventionist line on the part of Brüning on agricultural
subsidies. This bloc called for the retention of high grain prices, and -
even talked of the ‘duties of the consumer towards national
production’. However, the more dynamic, export-led section of
German industry, always more sympathetic to laissez-faire ideas,
favoured a ‘modernised and capable peasant agriculture’, which should
be incorporated into a more competitive industry. Market
responsiveness and varied cropping were the ideals; Holland and
Denmark the exemplars. One later writer for the RNS, and editor of
the reports of the International Conference on Agricultural Science, the
highly respected agrarian economist Constantin von Dietze, wrote a
report for the Chamber of German Industry in 1930, which
emphasised the virtues of market oriented peasant farming. His co-
author, Karl Brandt, emigrated to America in 1933-4, where he wrote
articles which, among other things, criticised the Junkers for their
backwardness, obstinacy, and continued political power. Darré’s
background of overseas trading expertise gave him natural allies among
many trade-oriented and technologically aware businessmen.*!

Darré’s hitherto unused abilities came into play during these three

years. He moved with absolute certainty, laying down a clear

ideological line that appealed to many of his members, but also
responding to their ideas. His nose for corruption and intrigue kept his
members on their toes. His analyses and predictions of motives and
behaviour were often proved accurate, excepting only the power of
financial incentive, where, as with all Nazis, he grossly underrated its
efficacy in increasing production. Darré’s group was more exclusive
than the NSDAP, which had formed a loose alliance with the DNVP,
the Stahlhelm and others, at Harzburg (the so-called ‘Harzburg Front’).
His farmers were not to belong to the Stahlhelm, because the leader
was a Freemason. The press and cinema empire controlled by
Hugenberg was a cheat, pushing an anodyne, ‘bourgeois’ line. Die Tat,
the nationalist intellectual journal controlled by Eugen Diedrichs, also
had masonic connections. About the only group outside the AD where
cross-membership was encouraged, was the Allgemeine SS, in 193f a
group of a few thousand part-time volunteers. Darré recOmmended his
members to visit their local SS groups, to see if they could be useful, a
condescending attitude that seems comically inappropriate in retrospect,
but which reflects the relative status of the SS at that time.¢?

Darré’s main ally now was Heinrich Himmler. The Race and

The Conspiracy

Settlement Office of the SS was established in 1932, largely through
Darré’s efforts, according to his diary, and his affidavit at the
Nuremberg trial. (The function and scope of this office will be
discussed at greater length in a larger chapter.) In the affidavit, he
described his motivation for founding the Racial Office as being to try
to instil in German society a sense of fair play and public-school spirit
that, he claimed, was taken for granted in English society, at all social
levels.63 However, odd this may sound, it is clear that Darré sensed a

lack of co-operation and community spirit in German society. Given

his own experiences, that is not surprising. The emphasis on this
Volksgemeinschaft does suggest that it was deficient to begin with. It has
by now become a historical truism that the National Socialist

government was structurally chaotic, and consisted largely of factional.
in-fighting. While this can be exaggerated, Germany in the 1930s did .

seem better at building motorways and motor cars than at handling its
own dissensions—quite apart from internal political opposition. It is
one of the many ironies of Darré’s life that he envisaged the SS racial
élite as a means of bringing the British public school ethic to Germany.

Darré and Himmler were both interested in the agrarian question.
Himmler was a trained farmer, like Darré, but he had had no practical
experience, and relied on Darré for factual information, and it is
probable that Darré, seven years older than Himmler, had influenced
the latter in this area. Both men were interested in peasant settlement,
and Himmler became liaison officer between the NSDAP and the
Artamanen in 1930.64 However, Himmler was interested in Indian
philosophy and the occult, and had several Indian friends and contacts
in the 1920s and 1930s, partly because he was drawn to these Aryan
Nazi sympathisers, but partly because of the political importance of the
Indian pro-German nationalists. Too much can be made of the
importance of bizarre cultism in Himmler’s activities—he is supposed
to have sent a party of SS men to Tibet in order to search for Shangri-
La, an expedition which is more likely to have had straightforward
espionage as its purpose—but it did exist, and was one ‘of the reasons
behind the split between Himmler and Darré that took place in the late
1930s. All the same, Herbert Backe thought that Himmler’s growing
romanticism and mystic interests was a result of Darré’s bad influence,
and while Darré was not interested in the occult, which he had jeered at

in the Nordic Ring, he was capable of inspiring others with his own .

enthusiasms, and many of his ideas re-emerged through Himmler in a
perverted form in later years.®>

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CHAPTER FIVE

The Nazi Minister

In June 1933, Darré was appointed Reichsbauernftihrer, National Pea-
sant Leader, and also Minister of Food and Agriculture. In September
1933 he presided over the creation of the Reichsnährstand or
RNS, translated here as the National Food Estate; the agricultural
marketing corporation. By 1936, Darré’s authority had waned, and
between 1939 and 1942, the year he was demoted, it was effectively
nullified. The story of Darré’s years in office is deeply interwoven with
that of his successor in 1942, Herbert Backe. In 1936, Backe was
nominated to represent agriculture on the Council for the Second Four
Year Plan, and from being second-in-command in the Ministry of
Agriculture, he came to be preferred to Darré. He was seen as a more
reliable, straightforward administrator, and an efficient and loyal
technocrat. From 1939, he was given the title of ‘Leader’ of the

‘ministry.

The Ministry of Agriculture rose in terms of its share of financial
resources from eighth largest ministry in 1933 to the fourth largest in
1944. Its budget rose seven times between 1934 and 1939, compared
with an ‘average increase of 170% for all ministries’.*-But it lost its
political power. Backe, Darré’s successor, only held on to his tenuous
position by supporting Hitler’s policies, while Darré remained loyal to
his principles and lost power. The two men had worked closely
together between 1931 and 1934. They pushed the Hereditary Farm
Law and the Marketing Law through a largely conservative and hostile
cabinet in 1933, and fought to keep agricultural settlement as the
preserve of the National Food Estate, when the Ministry of Economics
called for more ‘urban settlements’.? But by 1936, mutual hostility was so
great that Backe was appealing to Goering and Himmler to remove Darré,
while Darré was issuing a stream of defensive memoranda and letters.

The reason for this shift in authority is crucial’to a history of
agrarian ideology under the National Socialists. Was there a significant
ideological dimension to this feud, which still persists among followers
and friends of Darré and Backe? Or were revolutionary political

activists particularly prone to such squabbling—in that the habit of

The Nazi Minister

intensive opposition to the existing political system was hard to break,
and had to be directed somewhere? Was the Ministry for Agriculture
particularly affected, or was it symptomatic of Hitler’s method of
internal party rule, symptomatic of the multiplicity of competing
offices established after 1933? The relationship between Darré and Backe
does seem to illuminate certain problems of Nazi ideology, style and

policy.
One interesting side-issue is what exactly Backe’s ideas were. He

was, and is, often referred to as a non-ideological figure, a practical -

man with no interest in cranky ideas about Blood and Soil. Goebbels,
Kehrl, Speer and many modern authors have taken this line.?
However, Backe, a trained economist as well as a farmer, had a firm

commitment to a planned economy which is hard to reconcile with |

the picture of the pure pragmatist. He was one of the young Nazi
intellectuals, a friend of Die Tat writers Giselher Wirsing and
Ferdinand Fried Zimmerman. He was also accused of having ‘fantastic
goals’,* because of his attitude to de-collectivisation in Russia, but this
was due to his fear of losing a harvest during a changeover of
methods—a ‘pragmatic’ preference which was unsuccessful in this case,
and, it will be argued, typically so.

This chapter will argue that Backe’s motivation, ideas and style as a
human being sheds important light on the nature of National
Socialism. His belief in planning, action and need for loyalty to a
leader led him to join a secret, revolutionary group in the early 1920s.
Several members of this group were to hold high office in the Third
Reich, among them Theo Gross of the Racial Office. Backe, however,
has remained a shadowy figure, perhaps because he was not prosecuted
in the IMT Trial at Nuremberg. Even his name has suffered distortion
into Wilhelm and Ernest Backe, instead of Herbert Backe, by Speer
and Robert Koehl. He committed suicide in 1947, after months of
solitary confinement, and his name did not figure prominantly in the
1949 Wilhelmstrasse Trial which included Darré as defendant (Case XI).
But Backe was nominated by Hitler to the Donitz cabinet of April
1945, and was respected and trusted by Heydrich. Many of his peers
saw him as a prominent and representative intellectual. While
agriculture and the peasantry played an important role in his ideas, he
placed national politics first, and his loyalties gradually came to clash
with Darré’s, the more so as Backe’s admiration for Hitler grew, and
Darré’s admiration, such as it was, waned.

I realise that my tension and nervousness are a result of my

COLL NLA! ARIAL Sh ICE NENT ET ENE IE ITM WM A

The Nazi Minister

development being distorted—hindered and destroyed: my
hatred of the authors of this destruction [Russia] came about as
a result of that.®

This uncharacteristically introspective analysis by Backe indicates that

his ‘distorted’ development is worth examining. Such an admission is
rare in the autobiographical literature of NSDAP members, and
indicates something of Backe’s uncompromising honesty. In his prison
jottings of 1946, he laid down his own version, in which each phase of
his life was shown to give rise to certain thought processes, and an
exarnination of the documentary evidence from 1918 to 1945 bears out
his analysis quite closely.”

Backe, like so many other National Socialists, began as a member
of a beleaguered minority. As a German national, born in Batum in
1896, he entered the Tiflis State Gymnasium in 1905, at a time of

- increasing and sometimes violent Russian nationalism. His father, a

Prussian merchant, committed suicide while Backe was about fourteen
years old, and Backe had to work his way through secondary school.
Russia’s rapid modernisation between 1900 and 1914 was
accommpanied by a fierce hostility to all national minorities, and was
followed by wartime persecution of many minority groups—Germans

‘and Jews especially. Backe spent the war interned in a camp for

civilian aliens, in the Urals, while his elder brother fought in the
German army. He was exchanged to Germany in 1918 via Sweden, on
condition that he was not conscripted.

The attempt at forcible Russianisation produced fear-and contempt
in Backe: the hardships of internment, resentment. His first-hand
experience of civil war atrocities meant that his hatred extended to the
Bolsheviks; although he always kept an admiration for Russia’s
potential for achievement. His family had lost everything during the
war, and were penniless. Backe now had to keep three young sisters, a
sick mother, and an elder brother studying engineering. He worked for
six months in factories in the Rhineland, while taking his Abitur.
When Backe lost his factory job in the post-war depression, the family
moved to Hanover, where he worked as a drainage labourer in the
nearby moorland. When the girls were old enough, and physically
strong enough to find work, Backe trained for ‘his agricultural
diploma, again working his way through university. He began to
study at Gottingen in 1920-1. Vacations were spent working for board
and lodging only as a farm agent, as Darré was to spend months doing
in 1922. He took his diploma in 1923, with good marks. In

The Nazi Minister

many ways Backe was typical of the uprooted and. dispossessed
‘nouveau pauvre’ of early 1920s Germany. He commented in his 1946
Grosser Bericht that ‘lest this situation of an uprooted family appears
particularly striking, in fact there are millions of Germans in a similar
situation’.®

His first experience of Germany, therefore, was one of defeat and
bitterness. He. felt ‘deep disappointment’ at the behaviour of the

Germans, which was also a typical reaction for the returnee. He had

hoped to find a community at least united in defeat, but instead saw
‘egoism and materialistic strife ... the middle classes fighting among
themselves,’ and contemplated emigration.? This sense of
disillusionment and mutual rejection in a collapsing ‘homeland’ helped

push Backe into radical and militant attitudes in his early political.

activities. He refused to join a political party during the twenties,
because he believed in a supra-party communal spirit. He clearly had a
deep need to identify with a group, to operate within a closed
community. His calls for sacrifice in the service of the nation, his
emphasis on the value of self-denying behaviour, expressed the need to
enlarge the self within a greater whole which is so common in the
political drive and rhetoric of countries where the Protestant
confessions are a prominent cultural feature. It is interesting to note
that on the two occasions when this strong drive was denied in Backe,
in 1918 and in 1946-7, his reaction was a self-punitive one: a desire to
emigrate in 1918—and hence removal from the desired object,
Germany—and thoughts of suicide in 1945, culminating in an actual
suicide in 1947. Certainly, the draft testament he left behind is ample
evidence that his suicide was motivated not by a sense of guilt or
disillusionment with National Socialism, but with a world that he felt
had betrayed his ideas. .

Backe’s first employers in Hanover were all active Nazis, but he
seems not to have thought of joining the NSDAP himself until he met
Dr Ludolf Haase, then a medical student in Göttingen, in 1922.1° Backe
agreed to join the SA, but still refused to join a Party; and Haase paid
his subscription in secret. Backe had resented his inability to fight in
the First World War, when his elder brother served in the German
army, and he now threw himself into marching and bill-posting. But
his role was not confined to strong-man: he soon became the most
admired brain and ideological mentor for the Göttingen circle of
activists. Haase, as a schoolboy before the First World War, had
formed an anti-semitic group in Hanover, and continued distributing
leaflets in 1918-22.11 Several members of this small group

The Nazi Minister

in a quiet agricultural area were later to hold high party office, and
Haase later wrote, ‘When one of our members ... founded the racial
policy office of the NSDAP, this was no accident’. Backe, von
Gronow, Meinberg and Gross, all held top posts in the Third Reich.!?

In the last chapter, the takeover of Die Sonne by the Skald Order in
1932 was mentioned. Haase was a founder member of this secret
society, which was banned by the Nazis after 1933 because of its
allegedly masonic nature. An undated secret report on the’ Skald
written around 1936 mentions Haase and Gross, but not Backe, who
was also a member, according to his widow, and Princess zur Lippe.!3

‘` Heydrich was later to investigate Backe because of the Skald link; he

concluded, shortly before his assassination, that Backe was ‘all right’.
When Haase became a civil servant in 1942, Hitler had enquiries made,
but on learning that Haase worked under Backe, he told Heydrich that
there was no need to worry: Backe’s loyalty was legendary. Haase is
rumoured to have approached Backe in 1933, when Backe became
State Secretary under Darré, to pursue the aims of his secret society, to
be told by Backe, ‘I am not a rebel’.14

Haase was galvanised by the radical, militant and anti-semitic

rhetoric of the Munich Nazis in 1923, and formed a branch in Lower:

Saxony, which concentrated on ‘good organisation and efficient
personal leadership at all levels.’15 He aimed to bring together ‘a group
of really vélkisch men ... round whom the masses would crystalise’
when the right moment came. Backe was one of these leaders. He was
the chief expert on Russia and racial policy. ‘Not all’our ideology
came from books’, wrote Haase; for among their sources of live
information was ‘PG Backe, who had a special knowledge of all
eastern racial questions’. Backe supplied the group with ‘a knowledge
of Russia, its men, its ... history, and its geography.’!° The group
believed that Soviet rule in Russia could not last, and that in the
welter of successor states that would arise from a dismembered Russia,
Germany could seize land in the east, and German farmers migrate
there in force. This was bluntly stated in 1923, in a speech calling for

a new man as- dictator to unite Germany, throw out the Poles
and Czechs, prevent France from hindering Germany’s rise.
Social legislation, currency reform, and a new land law ... Our
colonial future, however, lies in the east, where a new land
beckons when Jewish rule in Russia should collapse. 17

The Nazi Minister

Backe’s support for this aim was useful for the Göttingen radicals.
The nationalists were split on the question of Russia. As mentioned in
chapter One, conservative nationalists as well as social democrats saw
Germany’s only possible future in a pact with the other ‘rogue’ state,
Russia; but Hitler’s criticism of the Treaty of Rapallo was that the
Russians should ‘shake off their tormentors’ before a Treaty could be
signed.1® Backe took a realpolitik view rather than an idealistic one.
Despite his contempt for the Russians, he recognised Russia’s potential

in terms of raw materials and human resources. He sarcastically `

attacked the idea of a Russian-German war in 1925, when many
nationalists supported the idea:

Who will put élite troops against Russia? France or England?
No. It will be German troops who will be used to pull the
chestnuts out of the fire. A war against the Soviets cannot be
lightly undertaken. It would become the whole Russian nation
engaging in a national fight for freedom against Western capital
... He should not become the enemy of the Russian people.
Germany’s future lies in the east, economically, as well as
politically. Currently, we cannot have close links with Soviet
Russia, but that is unavoidable.1?

Backe appears to have taken a radical stance on other matters,
including anti-semitism and revolutionary methodology, although here
again, caution should be used in using Haase where he is the only
source of information. He supported the idea of a revolutionary élite,
drawing heavily on Lenin’s What is to be Done? He rejected
parliamentary tactics aimed at achieving power legally within the
Weimar system. Whether or not to go for parliamentary power was a
matter for considerable dissent within the early Nazi Party up to
Strasser’s resignation in 1932, but Backe was not only hostile to
‘entryism’, but opposed to the Nazi belief in a mass movement. In his
notes for a speech in 1923, he wrote of his preference for a minority
élite who would form the leadership of a secret revolutionary group to
further the revolutionary cause. The élite would of course represent the
true feelings of the masses, as opposed to Bolshevik élitism, where the
minority had organised itself to oppose the will of the masses. Leaders
of a truly vélkisch movement would eventually incorporate the masses
through a process of ‘organic development’. Typically, Backe went out
of his way to praise those Soviet leaders whom he considered to be
competent organisers and planners, as opposed to the more populist,

The Nazi Minister

intellectual and Jewish end of the spectrum. ‘Lenin, Rykov, Chicherin,
Krylenko, Dzherzhinsky, are worthy of admiration. Unworthy:
Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Lunacharsky,’ et¢.?°

Why was the Russian question so central to the ideology of the.
northern Nazi radicals in 1923-5? They considered the Greater
Germany dream, the old nationalist aim of uniting all German-
speaking peoples, as the ‘purest pacifism’. They demanded a ban on
emigration to America, the incorporation of Flanders, Holland and
Luxembourg in a common customs and currency union, and
colonisation of the Russian borderlands. Backe, took pains to.
distinguish this plan from imperial adventurism, ‘no solution for the
victors or the conquered,’ and presumably welcomed German settlers
being accepted into Russia as benevolent improvers of the quality of
life, and of the quality of Volk. Backe and Haase both advocated a
strict eugenic policy, not to create a superior élite so much as to purge -
the nation of those suffering from hereditary defects. Their attitude to
Jews seems to have been tougher than that of Feder, Strasser, and other
more urban-oriented Nazis. Although quoting approvingly the
Eckhart-inspired lines in the 1925 Party Manifesto, ‘We will fight the
Judaeo-materialistic spirit within and outside ourselves’, Haase and
Backe also warned that Jews would not be accorded the usual rights of
foreign nationals within Germany, and that any alliance with Jews in
other countries would be prevented, ‘and any return made impossible
once and for all’.2!

Backe’s strong will and polemical abilities, his tough attitude and
comradeship, were prized in Gottingen, and he was a great loss to the
group when he dropped all political activity and moved to Hanover to
work on a doctorate in agriculture. Haase commented in his memoirs
that Backe had been especially ‘important during the early time of
struggle’, not only because of his sharp thinking and uncompromising
stance, but because of ‘his ability to create a rounded Weltanschauung’
and his ‘characteristic toughness, which so many Germans lacked.’2?

At Hanover, Backe became research assistant to Professor Obst at
the Technische Hochschule. Obst, who had worked with General
Professor Karl Haushofer a year earlier, was a geo-politician whose
book England, Europe and the World helped to stimulate Backe’s views
on autarky and Germany’s need for a European trading zone which he
expounded in his thesis. A plan to visit Russia as agricultural adviser.
for the Hanover Chamber of Agriculture fell through when the
Russian Government vetoed Backe’s name: in 1927, his doctoral thesis
was rejected on the grounds that it was a work of political science

The Nazi Minister

rather than agriculture. Backe suspected political bias against him, and
the political implications of the work were considerable, as Backe
argued in his conclusion that the colonisation of Russia by Germany
was a geo-political inevitability. When Obst was obliged against his
will to dismiss Backe, he decided to ignore politics and concentrate on
farming. After another year spent working for board and lodging
only, Backe married the daughter of a Silesian industrialist, who had

worked as an assistant to Obst, and who was herself a radical

nationalist, who corresponded with Spengler, and knew the
Bruckmanns. She strongly supported agrarian radicalism. His father-in-
law provided enough capital to take on the tenancy of a neglected
state-owned farm near the Harz mountains, where Backe was able to
put his ideas into practice, using small-scale farm machinery, and
consolidating and improving what had been a seven-field system.
Although the rent was low, the venture coincided with the onset of
the Depression, and the collapse in food prices.??

Between 1929 and 1931, when his first meeting with Hitler took
place, he rejoined the SA. His wife recounts that he did this because his
farm labourers were SA men, and he felt it his duty to join them, an
interesting sidelight on noblesse oblige. Backe used to go with his men
to nearby Braunschweig, where the forbidden brown shirt could be
donned, and a march proceed. In 1931, he stood as candidate for the
NSDAP in the election to the Hanover Chamber of Agriculture, but
lost in the second ballot to a candidate from the Landbund. In July,
1931, Backe had an article on Germany’s trade and agricultural
problems published in the National-Socialist Zeitung. Werner
Willikens, a friend of Backe, already working with the NSDAP AD,
showed Darré the article, who wrote enthusiastically to Backe, asking
him to write for the AD. Despite the ‘strong impression’ that Hitler
had made on Backe, he refused to become involved, giving as reasons
his need to work on the farm, the economic crisis and his own lack of
literary talent. Darré asked him to edit Ruhland’s works, and again
Backe, who had not read the System of Political Economy, although he
had enthusiastically quoted Ruhland in 1923, refused, through lack of
time. His wife, who had read Darré’s two books with fervent
admiration, wanted Backe to join the AD and become more active in
the NSDAP. The two men exchanged attacks on the profit motive in
agriculture (‘not reconcilable with the peasantry’) and jeered at recent
English legislation on smallholdings.?* ,

Backe had failed to formulate exact agricultural policies when he
met Darré in 1931. The fact that Darré had formulated such policies, and

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was offering concrete solutions, meant that Backe could throw his
energies into implementing Darré’s plan without being aware of any
possible conflict of views..Here again, Backe’s need for a complete,
rounded view of a given project was an important factor. His goals
were immediate. Well rounded, well thought-out processes had to be
followed by potent action and the necessary will to carry it through.
In this sense, the two men complemented each other in the first few
years of their joint activities. Backe’s failure to formulate policy was
not because Backe had lost interest in agricultural policy during his
years as a practising farmer, as the article published in 1931 which
attracted Darré’s attention developed his belief that the world trade

“system was in a state of collapse, and with it agricultural productivity,

in so far as it was geared to international markets: it was more a failure
to consider detail.

On his wife’s insistence, Backe read Darré’s two books, and wrote
in a second article that Darré’s suggested restructuring of German
society around the small farmer was the only answer to the ‘social
problem’. Darré was impressed by Backe’s points, laid out with a
compulsive air of certainty, and asked Backe to visit a Weimar
conference in October 1931, to instruct the agricultural department
personnel in macro-economic matters.?°

Backe refused the invitation. He felt little interest in ideas about
self-governing corporations that were being examined at this period.
Similarly, although he approved Ruhland’s criticism of the
international commodity system, (‘so absolutely classic ... banks and
finance capital above all were the gainers from ‘these events’),
Ruhland’s proposal for agricultural syndicates made no appeal. Darré
later decided (quite wrongly) that Backe’s lack of enthusiasm in the
invitation meant that his later interest in the AD was spurious, and he
wrote after the Second World War that Backe was infiltrated into the
NSDAP by Ludolf Haase and the Skald. Indeed, he referred during the
war to the ‘Hanover clique’, whenever Haase or Backe appeared near
him in Berlin. This was a source of continual agitation to Backe,
because of the investigation by Heydrich.

It was only after hearing Hitler speak to the SA at Braunschweig in
the autumn of. 1931 that Backe decided to visit Munich, and see what
was happening there among the National Socialist agrarian activists.

In the first flush of Darré’s enthusiasm and energy, the slight frisson
over Ruhland was discounted. He was recruiting whatever talent he
could find, to work in the AD and its nationwide branches. Nothing
could have been more generous than his attitude to Backe, his respect

The Nazi Minister

for Backe’s polemical abilities, his encouragement and advice, both
political and personal, and his acknowledgement of Backe’s role in the
early rise to power. In fact, if anything, he exaggerated Backe’s
abilities. Backe had a gift for stating a situation in terms which
appeared to be cogent and analytical, but which, if scrutinised closely,
turned out to consist of sweeping statements of principle, without
much backing. in argument or logic. His need for a superficially

orderly thought-system reflected not ‘pragmatism’ but the need for a

highly structured framework of ideas which would provide the
certainties he needed. Nearly every memorandum and letter he wrote
contained the words Klarheit and grundsätzlich; it hardly needs an
elaborate exegetical or psychological analysis to guess.that this virtual

obsession with the need for mental clarity and a firm basis expressed its

lack in Backe’s make-up. Because of this, he could be influenced by
potential leader figures. First Darré, then Hitler, held his loyalty in the
NSDAP. When Darré’s divergence from the National Socialist path
became clear in the late 1930s, Backe had no difficulty in deciding
which to choose.

His wholly misleading vein of certainty appeared when he finally
visited Munich in January 1932. He heard Hitler address the assembled
Gauleiters, and the Gau agricultural advisers, many of whom Backe
already knew from his old SA days. Hitler’s speech stressed the
importance of the agricultural sector to the German nation. ‘Our
highest aim is not only to win the city workers ... the NSDAP is not
only a party of the cities, but is today the greatest peasant party,’ a
speech which impressed Backe, for a revealing reason: ‘Hitler unified
the entire political problem into one simple line’.26

Backe addressed the Landesgruppenführer, the agricultural cadre
leaders, at the same conference, at Darré’s request, and spoke about
world agriculture. In the discussion that followed. Backe was distressed
at the gap between the well-formulated, unified ideology presented by
Hitler, and the ‘lack of clarity’ of Darré and his co-workers. This
criticism was not made specifically, as he simply accused Darré’s group
of ignoring ‘agriculture’s real problems and the necessary measures’.
But a look at his specific criticism of the agricultural department shows
that what he was attacking was the lack of a single, basic ideological
attitude. ‘An all-embracing analysis of the forces active in economics
was lacking—a precondition for alleviating conditions on the land.’
Instead of concentrating their ideas on the collapse of world economic
relationships, he was disgusted to find the LBF’s discussing the
Genossenschaften, the Landbund ‘and other organisations, such as the

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The Nazi Minister

Artamanen movement, tariffs, the importance of-rent’. Backe’s reaction
reveals the inadequacies of his yearning for an integral o holistic `
approach. The tactics adopted by the NSDAP AD were all-important
to the eventual takeover of power. Each of these apparently trivial-
‘single issues’ had to be carefully considered to see whether it was
absorbable by the NSDAP or an irritant, and tactically the method
paid off.

In order to play his part in Darré’s programme of infiltrating the
Agricultural Unions, Backe stood as National Socialist representative
for election to the Prussian Agricultural Chamber, and became a
member in April 1932. He disliked this episode. Contact with
parliamentary methods reinforced his earlier contempt for them.
‘German parliamentarianism will never carry out the necessary
economic reforms,’ he wrote.?7

During 1933, the two men co-operated closely. The existence of a
common Conservative enemy in the shape of Hugenberg, Minister of
Economics and Agriculture, from January 1933 to July, when Darré
took over, and von Rohr, Darré’s most trenchant Conservative critic
and Hugenberg’s State Secretary, enabled Backe and Darré to make
common cause in the fight to keep the AD going, and take over from
Hugenberg. The Conservatives still had a majority in the Cabinet at
this stage. Early in January 1933, Darré sent a telegram to Backe asking
him to help lay the AD proposals before Hitler, in view of the
worsening agricultural situation. Although agriculture was beginning
to pull itself out of the long depression, few realised this at the time,
and prices were rock bottom. The request gives an indication of Darré’s
lack of confidence in his own abilities to persuade Hitler, his reliance
on Backe, but also his sense of security about his own position. Three
weeks before the Nazi takeover of power in March 1933, the two men
worked closely on the report, which was given to Hitler verbally at a
meeting. Backe did most of the talking, as the most persuasive of
Darré’s staff, and Hitler approved a statement calling for the need for a
‘total change of the agricultural marketing and production structure.’
The AD staff sent a postcard to Mrs Backe, which reads: ‘Dear Ursula,
everything went as it should, Hbt. Your husband did very well,
Willikens. The.report was wonderful, Darré.’2®

Darré’s single-mindedness in pursuit of the enemy was now turned
against Hugenberg, whom he described as a ‘blockhead’, and von
Rohr. He sent open letters to Chancellor Schleicher, using a polemical,
reproachful, tough tone. Hugenberg rapidly passed a debt interest

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reduction law, which kept interest rates for farmers below two per
cent, but this was not enough to protect his position. He then,
although not previously known for anti-semitism, made a strongly-
worded speech on foreign policy and racial matters in London, during
the summer of 1933, possibly in an attempt to maintain his position in
the face of Nazi attacks. However, the conservatives, shocked at the
speech, asked Hitler for Hugenberg’s resignation, which Hitler was
happy to grant, as it removed a powerful member of the DNVP from
the cabinet. Von Rohr was another threat, typifying the conservative
opposition to the proposed agrarian legislation.2?

The planned new marketing system, for example, was forcefully

opposed by him, because von Rohr realised that the end of Brüning’s-

draconian deflationary measures should see an upturn in economic
confidence; and that agriculture should share in the upturn. He feared
that to introduce rigidity into the agricultural system by limiting
mobility of land use, restricting credit and controlling prices would
prevent peasants reaping the expected benefit. Another area of dispute
was the AD plan to divide up large estates and settle peasants on them.
Hugenberg, especially, opposed this. A legislative basis for this
Proposition already existed in the Weimar Constitution, which
permitted the seizure of land without compensation ‘in the interests of
the State and the community’. In order to protect himself, Hugenberg
went ‚some way to meet the Nazi radicals. He installed a
Reichskommissar to oversee dairy production, a measure of which Backe
approved, as the ‘first attempt at controlled marketing’, and a ‘success’.
Hugenberg pressed for his debt legislation to be retrospective. While
this attempt to defuse hostility between himself and the radical Nazis
was proceeding, von Rohr also kept a low profile, writing enthusiastic
speeches about Blood and Soil with no apparent qualms, during the
spring of 1933, but attacking Darré and his policies during cabinet
meetings.3°

However the AD, led by Darré, were determined to ‘break into the
ministry’, knowing that their survival as a group of well trained,
highly motivated agricultural experts and planners depended on it. The
NSDAP was waiting for them to put a foot wrong; their relative
independence was feared and envied. Hugenberg, leader of the DNVP,
and a millionaire in his own right, owner of a chain of newspapers and
film companies, seemed a dangerous enemy. Darré looked for support
among the peasant community. ‘Send your former leaders to the devil.
What have they ever done for you? Suffering and hunger, hunger and
suffering,’?! he wrote in an article that provoked the National

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Landowner’s Association to complain to Funk of its strident tone. He
sent a telegram to Hitler on 4th April, calling for a radical turn to
government policies. Looking back after the. war, Darre seemed the
logical choice for minister?? but at the time he had to force his way .
through to government level.

. One means was the Prussian parliament, which provided Darré’s
first victory against Hugenberg.?? In April 1933, Darré and Backe met
him to try to win his support for the proposed new marketing laws,
and to discuss the new Prussian Inheritance Law. The latter was to
provide a ‘dry run’ for a national Inheritance Law. Hugenberg refused
to give way on either proposition. He disapproved of institutionalising

` controlled prices, and agreed with von Rohr on the potential problems

of the Inheritance Law, which would immobilise land transactions.
Goering, Prime Minister of Prussia, was approached instead.?* Hans
Kerrl, the Prussian Minister of Justice, ‘seized the initiative’ on 15th
May, 1933, after a conference with Willikens, and pushed the Prussian
Inheritance Law through the Prussian Parliament against the opposition
both of Hugenberg and the Prussian Minister of Agriculture.3°

This was a triumph for both Darré and Backe, who had jointly
drafted the law, and Darré later wrote generously of Hans Kerrl’s role
in ‘performing a historical service’.2® On 4th May, 1933, Darré was
elected the chairman of the council of all agricultural organisations, the
post filled by Brandes when Darré had been job hunting in 1928. He
promised Backe that he would be State Secretary as soon as Darré had
control of the Ministry for Agriculture. Backe was still his ‘closest co-
worker’. He wrote that ‘Darré was wonderful’, although he found
many of Darré’s personal staff inadequate, there either because of their
name and status, or because of past services to the Party. Darré’s ability
to make rapid decisions and think ahead was impressive, and Backe felt
that at last ‘he had worked at something important’ with the Prussian
Inheritance Law.37 In fact, the Prussian Inheritance Law had to some
extent legalised existing north German primogeniture customs. The
real problems lay in the future, when the law was extended to areas of
Germany that had known the Code Napoleon for nearly 130 years,
and were used to multiple sub-division of the land among the heirs.

Between May and June 1933, Hitler was pressed by Schacht, von
Papen and Hindenburg to retain Hugenberg. ‘For Hitler, my
opposition to Hugenberg is a problem: I have the peasants, while
Hugenberg has the position of power that he built up,’ wrote Darré.
Hindenburg invited Darré to visit him in order to ask him not to
‘destroy the great estates’. The visit went well socially, as the two men

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found a common enthusiasm for the Hanoverian horse; but nothing
was agreed on the vexed issue of land tenure.38

However, as mentioned earlier, Hugenberg’s attempt to outdo the
Nazis in his London speech alarmed his fellow conservatives, and in
June 1933 he resigned from the Government, giving Darré and the AD
a free hand. On 14th July 1933, the Reichsgesetz über die Neubildung
Deutschen Bauerntums, the Law for the New Formation of a German
Peasantry, was passed, giving the AD in its new guise of Agricultural
Policy Office a free hand to organise peasant settlement. However, it
appeared that a bargain had been struck behind Darré’s back. Despite
his apparently powerful position as head of the Ministry of Agriculture
and national peasant leader, the Law for the New Formation of the

German Peasantry limited settlement to land which was available for

purchase on the open market, plus land owned by the state, in need of
reclamation. Nor were the necessary funds forthcoming from the
Finance Ministry.39-

The National Inheritance Law increased pressure on the settlement
department. The younger sons of those farmers now subject to the
rules of primogeniture had been promised new farms and
smallholdings as compensation for their loss of prospects. Nonetheless,
the AD refused to be deterred by the stumbling block over funds.
They hoped that the shortage of money would be only temporary, and
during August and September Backe and Willikens worked steadily on
the draft law. ‘As peasant leader Darré is splendid, he has instinctive
certainty’, Backe wrote in August. Even a year later, his wife could
note in her diary, ‘Herbert says Darré’s work will be seen as the great.
success of National Socialism ... the RNS staff are realism itself ...
without Darré’s vision and large-scale political aims, nothing could have
been achieved.’4°

After enthusiastic discussion, Goslar was chosen as the new peasant
capital. Goslar was an early medieval town in the foothills of the Harz
mountains, the capital of the Holy Roman Empire in the tenth
century. Its history as a mining, farming, independent city state
conformed to Darré’s ideal of the republican freeman, and suited his
admiration of the Renaissance city states. He knew Goslar from his
sister’s schooldays, and his mother was buried there. Furthermore, the
countryside around the little town was unspoilt; gently rolling hills
where sheep grazed, while to the south stretched the Harz mountains,
He decided on Goslar as a suitable centre for the rebirth of peasant
Germany after examining photographs of this serene landscape. Peasant
festivals were held on the slopes of the Bückeberg, rallies attended by

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up to half a million farmers, and often addressed by Hitler. The
National Food Estate’s meetings were held in the hall beneath an old
hotel, once the town hall. It still has its medieval paintings on the
beams. The dream was to make Goslar the centre of a new peasants
international; a green union of the northern European peoples. Here he
made speeches condemning the ‘Fiihrer’ principle and attacking imperial
expansion. Visitors flocked to him. Organic farming enthusiasts from
England now welcomed Darré’s plans, and admired the hereditary
tenure legislation. Representatives from Norwegian and Danish peasant
movements joined the conferences on ‘Blood and Soil’. The real heart
of the muddle of agricultural ministry, National Food Estate, NSDAP

’ Agricultural Office, Peasant Leader’s Office and personal Minister’s

office lay in the National Peasant Council’s Keeper of the Seal, and this
too centred on Goslar. Here, the personal files of all members, who
included the Reichsleitung, Gauleiters and all Landesbauernführer, were
kept, together with correspondence with the far-flung, decentralised
National Food Estate offices. The first holder of the post was an old
Halle friend of Darré’s, Richard Arauner, who was killed in a car crash
in 1937. He was succeeded by a Gauleiter Eggeling.*!

But as early as 1933, the first hint that Darré’s large-scale aims might
become out of step with those around him had already appeared.
‘Economically, he is inclined to erect ambitious intellectual structures—
getting things basically right, because he can see ahead, but the flight
of his thoughts is too quick. He sees at once aims which could only be
reached in a century or in decades’. Backe’s assessrnent was right.
Darré’s very ability to stick to his radical views, which had been such
an asset in the Kampfzeit, was now becoming a liability: He refused to
admit that the revolutionary time was over, and that for his
companions the time for consolidating power and power bases had
come. When Darré and Backe visited Schmitt at the Ministry of
Economics in early September 1933, to discuss the proposed Debt
Relief Law, Backe found Darré’s unexpected remarks about trade
policy and tariffs an embarrassment. While he regarded Schmitt and
Posse as politically ‘unsound’, he sided with them when Darré
expounded his radical proposals to de-industrialise Germany, to leave
the cities to decay, and to concentrate resources on the land.*2

However, Darré still supported Backe as von Rohr’s successor. Von
Rohr opposed the Inheritance Law in a Cabinet discussion of October
12th, 1933, at which Darré’s survival as Minister came into question. It
was in part due to Backe’s persuasive lobbying of Schacht and other

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opponents that the Inheritance Law went through, and Darré dedicated
the first copy of the National Law Joumal containing the EHG to ‘my
dear Backe, to whom the birth of this law owes so much’. Both men
considered this law, and the National Food Estate Law, which erected
a marketing board to supervise and purchase all primary and secondary
agricultural produce, as the ‘liquidation of Hardenberg’ (Darré), the
‘complete demolition of the last 150 years’ (Backe), and so on. “The
Inheritance Law is the deathblow to Reaction, and all that is implied
by the large landowner [Grossgrundbesitz]’.*?
To some extent, this was wishful thinking. What Darré had done
was to give small to medium sized farms (originally seven to 75

hectares) the same legal protection against foreclosure and sale as the

large entailed estates had. This did not make their competitive position
stronger. Darré had not even begun to strike the deathblow at the
Junkers which he sought, and which the Junkers feared. Six years later,
he managed to pass the Entailed Estates Law (Fidei-Kommissgesetz)
which dissolved the remaining 1400 or so entailed estates. This act, by
‘ending the feudal millenium’, introduced the capitalist one, rather than
the allegedly idyllic pre Bauernlegung era. By removing all restrictions
on use, pension obligations, life interests, and other barriers to land
mobility and alienability, fully capitalist relationships were introduced
to entailed land-holdings. Junker power did weaken, but this was due
to the complete shift in power structures under the Third Reich. The
new armed force, the SS, the increase in meritocratic ideas, the attempt
to open up the civil service, and the increase in government posts, all
demanded a more open recruitment policy. The middle management
class, the foremen, the scientists, the NCO and Major levels in the
army, these produced Hitler’s most devoted followers in the 1930s.
Agricultural legislation by itself played little part, despite Darré’s sincere
intentions.**

In any case, entailed estates were a symbol rather than a real force:
they formed a numerically tiny minority of estates over 500 hectares,
although a higher proportion were m noble hands. Here Darré was a
victim of the current presumptions of his time about the backward,
feudal nature of the Junkers, while at the same time attributing Junker
power to the Hardenburg reforms of 1811-16, a myth that persists to
this day. The result was a strange kind of shadow play. Although
Darré no longer represented a real threat to large landowners, once his
land division plans were passed over, he was still feared. He attacked
the Junkers fiercely in 1934 at Starkow, to the enthusiastic applause of

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30,000 peasants. He complained of an ‘agricultural plutocracy’ in a
speech to the German Agricultural Society in 1933. In January 1935, a
new Settlement Act was passed, which increased the pre-emptive
powers of government land | purchasing agencies, although not
increasing their funds. Small wonder, then that Darré was feared by the
conservatives, and admired by his fellow radicals, despite the lack of
real result.45

Once the 1933 legislation was passed—in the case of the National
Food Estate, with remarkable ease, considering the still somewhat
Conservative cabinet—new problems emerged. Backe’s enthusiasm
began to wane. The creation of the marketing system had been
satisfying: the job of enforcing it was more difficult.

The first obstacle was the heavy debt burden carried by German
farms. Backe had planned a Umschuldungsgesetz, which would have
divided up agriculture’s debt burden equally between all the Erbhéfe, but
this was too much for a partly Conservative cabinet to swallow, and
the law was thrown out on 14th October, 1933. Backe was mystified
by the hostility to the draft law. Farms in the east were three times
more in debt than their equivalents in the west. Eastern farms which
had invested heavily in machinery and increased productivity were the
worst hit. He failed to understand why farmers in the west should

` object to ‘sharing the burden of their brothers in the east’, and taking

over their debts at a low rate of interest. When the law was dropped,
and a plan to fix interest rates at two per cent adopted, Backe observed
critically that this showed that Hitler had dropped his corporate ideals,
and was beginning to think from a nation-state viewpoint.*®

Other difficulties arose. The staff needed to control production
levels and distribution was a huge expense which was funded by the
farmers themselves. Furthermore, Germany had begun 1933 with low
food reserves, and although the 1933 harvest was good, that of 1934
was poor. Darré’s reaction was to ask Schacht for foreign currency to
buy fodder for livestock, to enable the ‘fats gap’ to be closed
(Germany produced about 50% of her fats requirement). He was to
wage a three-year battle of speeches, letters and memoranda against
Schacht, who was determined to avoid inflationary measures.47 He
attacked Schacht for economic liberalism at the 1934 Bauerntag. He told
Hitler that Schacht was to blame for problems with foreign trade.
However, Hitler received these tirades with passive inaction, which
became active resistance in mid-1934. Goering and other party leaders
began to criticise the marketing corporation for lack of co-operation, a

hostile attitude, and inefficiency. Darré’s request for a further price

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The Nazi Minister

increase for livestock producers was refused by Hitler. The request
involved a loss of face for Darré, since he had fended off a previous
concerted attack by a group of Gauleiters by telling Hitler that cereal
prices (and hence bread prices) should not be raised, knowing that
Hitler supported a policy of cheap food for the workers.

Darré and Backe had requested this meeting with Hitler, which
took place on 5th July, 1934.48 .Darré was concerned with prices for
producers, while the attacks on him concentrated on consumer prices.
At this stage, one of life’s basic problems had emerged in all its stark
reality; that you cannot have a policy of dear food and cheap food at
the same time. During the change-over to distribution controlled by
the RNS, wholesale-retail margins shot up temporarily, as reports up
to 1936 show. It has been argued that official figures do not reflect the
true rise in retail food prices, but if agricultural producer price indexes
are broken down, it can be seen that wheat prices fell to 85 in the year
1933-4, from 91 in 1932-3 (taking 1928 as the base year=100), while
livestock prices rose from 53 in 1932-3 to 59 to 1933-4. Darré felt that
this was not enough to help the small farmer/livestock producer. In
1934-5, the livestock index rose to 72, and the following year, to 90.
Another reason for Darré to favour lower grain prices was that
Germany was virtually self-sufficient in grain, and increasing grain
production was not a major policy aim. Of course, grain growers were
also associated with the hated east Elbian farmers and their subsidies of
the late Weimar period, so that wheat price movements between 1933
and 1936 were untypical of other agricultural prices.*?

Hitler displayed distinct signs of boredom at the meeting between
Darré, Backe, himself and the Gauleiters. He took up a newspaper and
began to read. He asked Darré jestingly if he had ‘mystical-romantic’
feelings about the bread price, and when Darré replied that he wanted it
lowered, he said, ‘Good, that is my opinion also,’ and closed the
meeting. This left matters hanging as far as the balance of power
between the National Food Estate and the Gauleiters was concerned.5°

Darré then sent Backe, in August 1934, to discuss food prices with
Dr Ley, head of the German Labour Front. The Trustees of Labour
had a two-fold conflict with the National Food Estate. First, there was
a clash of jurisdiction regarding agricultural labourers, and second, the
trustees wanted the cheapest possible food for their labourers. But
Backe drowned out Ley’s complaints with a contemptuous lecture on
the workings of supply and demand.5! Also in August 1934, Goering
launched an attack on the Ministry of Agriculture. He collated 30
pages of complaints from the Gauleiters of thirty-one districts, accusing

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the agricultural officials of independence, interference with Party
matters, and disloyalty. Goebbels, more seriously, had accused the
RNS in January 1934 of not supporting the Winterhilfe programme, a
charity which provided food and clothing for the unemployed; it was
run by Party workers, and played an important role in maintaining the
Party’s image as friend of the working class. Darré produced a 47-page
rebuttal, sought a meeting with Goebbels to discuss the charges, and
then squabbled about the administrative ‘hat’ Goebbels was wearing.
Goebbels walked out.52

Hitler installed Goerdeler, ex-mayor of Danzig, and later
participant in the bomb plot of 1944 against Hitler, to be Price
Commissioner until July 1935. Goerdeler recommended lower
agricultural prices, a return to the free market, and the elimination of
the inefficient farmer. This was consonant with what is known of
Hitler’s own economic views, but was blamed on Darré’s inability to
interest Hitler sufficiently in agricultural problems.5? Goerdeler’s plan
was an attack on the RNS ethos, since the agricultural advisers were
meant to substitute education and advice for the self-correcting
mechanisms of economic competition. Both Backe and Darré smarted
under Goerdeler’s attacks. In an attempt to find allies, Darré was even
driven to compromise with Ley, in 1935, in the so-called ‘Biickeberger

‘Agreement’. According to this arrangement, the National Food Estate

joined the German Labour Front, and replaced the Labour Front’s
agricultural labour section. They agreed to contribute funds in
exchange for sharing some of their welfare arrangements, such as
supplementary unemployment insurance, free holidays, and so on. This
move was unpopular with farmers, who were not anxious for their
agricultural labourers to join an external and powerful body. Goerdeler
fell on this sign of weakness, and drafted a law whose effect would
have been to dissolve the National Food Estate, under the guise of
simplifying the corporation’s structure.54

Backe was taken by surprise by Darré’s vacillation over Goerdeler’s
move. He waited for Darré to go to Hitler and demand Goerdeler’s
dismissal, and when he did not, decided that Darré was ‘a flop:
internally weak and insecure, and lacking in courage’. Backe by now
had moved away from Darré’s long-term and supra-political aim of a
peasant-based Germany, which would lead to the ‘racial renewal’ of
the German people. The ‘Battle for Production’ had been-launched in
November 1934, and this led him back to his main interests of the
early 1920s, the belief that Germany’s agricultural problems were
inextricably bound up in the world-wide economic system. He wrote

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to 1936 that he was searching for ‘an economic principle that would
embrace the whole of the economy, not just agriculture’, and tried to
define his.ideas by studying economists, such as Sombart. His concern
was about Germany’s lack of self-sufficiency in raw materials and some
foods. In order to create a new economic system, Germany had to be
able to survive without dependence on multi-lateral foreign trade. This
was not so much because of boycotts against Germany, the loss of
colonies, etc., but because Backe saw this as the ‘new’ system, a ‘new’
idea, into which Germany, first of all nations, had been forced by post-
war circumstances. To define the ‘new idea’ precisely proved more
difficult, but as it was seen by Backe and his circle a matter more of spirit
and will than of pedantic definitions, the imprecision did not matter.°®

At the highest party levels, Backe’s success in the fight for higher
productivity was noted, and his aggressive nationalism approved.
Backe was sociable, unlike Darré: a good companion with whom to
drink and talk for an evening. He was loyal, intelligent, and above
personal ambition. In 1936, he was appointed agricultural
representative to Goering’s Council of the Four Year Plan.

The genesis of this appointment was ironical. Darré had asked the
Ministry of Economics in March 1936 to set up an enquiry into
foreign currency, raw materials and food, as part of his battle against
Schacht and the share of foreign reserves allocated to agricultural imports.
Goering was put in charge of the investigation, with Schacht a last-
minute substitute for Blomberg. This ‘fixed’ the committee, while
Schacht wrote a memorandum on foreign exchange on 23rd April
1935. Early in May, Hitler ordered Goering to form a new committee
on raw materials to examine national autarky. Both Darré and Backe
attended the first meeting of this committee, at which 19 Ministers
were present.

In June, Parchmann, an official in the Forestry Office, and a keen
admirer of Backe’s, recommended him to Goering as a gifted
economist. Backe now represented the agricultural sector on Goering’s
committee on the organisation of raw materials and currency, which
met on 6th July, while on the 15th, he was formally nominated to the
Council. The Second Four Year Plan Council was convened on 18th
October 1936, and Backe was appointed agricultural representative.
This* marked a shift of power from Darré to Backe. For other
ministries, figure-heads were co-opted to liaise between the council and
the ministers, but by placing the gifted and articulate Backe in this
role, Darré had effectively been demoted. “The personal union between
Backe and the Food and Agriculture Committee means that (there)

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will always be a lever against me’, wrote Darré, who pushed first a
National Food Estate nonentity, then himself for the post. He added in `
his diary, in his first criticism of Backe, ‘Now Goering will understand
what I have to put up with. Backe’s Russian nature ... talk, talk all
night, never action’.5®

Were Darre’s fears for his position alone? One problem with tracing
these power plays and strategies is that it is easy to assume that

“ personal position alone was at stake. But here Darré was aware that he

was virtually the sole ‘bearer’ of the peasant ideal. If he went, there
would be nobody to take his place. However it was also obvious that
if he stayed, he would be a lone voice. The day of drastic social re-
shaping, of revolutionary fervour, was gone, and ideas of ignoring the
worker interest in favour of the peasantry were not popular, especially
with Hitler. Well aware of Gauleiter hostility to the RNS, his especial
creation, Darré feared that Backe might be prepared to renounce its
relative independence and corporate structure. Certainly, the Four Year
Plan, with its centralised planning and war economy, was a death blow
for peasant socialism.57 Backe realised that a modernised and highly
organised economy was the natural development for the ‘new
Germany’. He was attracted by the prospect of a German empire,
while Darré recognised the ‘preference for an empire over internal

‘reform’ as a defeat for his beliefs. However, he had lost his touch for

political campaigns. Not realising this, he kept hitting out at his foes,
often using irrelevant quibbles about competence that other ministers
found tiresome. He was perhaps vain enough to want to cling to
office, despite the expected disaster, but not sufficiently vain to lay aside
his beliefs for the sake of ambition.

The constant arguments and frustration affected Backe’s health, already
weakened by his hardships in youth, and he spent some time in a
sanatorium for heart cases. Goering became concerned at the extent to
which his usefulness was affected by the disagreements within the
ministry, and told Backe to return to Berlin to discuss the matter.
Backe’s main complaints at the ensuing meeting were that Darré could
not control his staff, who were pretty useless anyway, and that Darré
had no understanding of economic questions. He forcefully criticised
Darré’s indecision and vacillation, his lack of judgment, and his
tetchiness. Goering was obviously tempted by the idea of getting rid of
Darré. He mused that it would be a mistake to assume that the National
Food Estate had the whole-hearted support of the peasantry—even
Himmler, Darré’s great friend, would agree to that. However, he finally

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The Nazi Minister

decided, regretfully, that it would be impossible to sack a Nazi minister
without damaging the reputation of the other Nazi ministers.5®

While Darr& sat at home nursing an Achilles tendon strained in a
400 metres race, Backe visited Himmler at Tegernsee, in September
1936. He found him ‘impressive, but humourless and tense’. Himmler
repeated Goering’s point about the need for unity as far as the public
were concerned. A lack of unity had been the rock on which all such
movements had foundered in the past, and he saw it as his special task
to maintain unity whatever the cost. After Himmler stressed Darré’s
past services to the party, the fact that ‘he had been absolutely
necessary for the movement’, Backe cooled down his complaints. He
now directed his attack to Darré’s subordinates, winning Himmler’s
favour in this by accusing them of wanting to raise agricultural
prices—a move Hitler opposed (‘Himmler especially impressed’).
Himmler ended the session by promising to have a word with Darré,
and warning Backe against Moritz, one of Darré’s staff members,
because he was suspected of being Jewish.5?

Darré heard about these visits, and responded vigorously, but soon
found that it was one thing to lash out in 1931, attacking the Landbund,
attacking Die Tat, and the Stahlhelm because of its Masonic
connections, and quite another to go for the top Nazi leaders in 1936.
He could not even protect his own men. One Kreisbauernfiihrer was
dismissed and imprisoned for six months in 1935 for repeating an
allegation heard at a Goslar Peasant Festival that Blomberg and most of
the senior army officers were Freemasons.©°

For Darré, it was a reversal to the 1926 days when he sent secret
reports on corruption and treachery to unconcerned, uninterested
committee members. His judgment had gone. For example, in response

to a purely formal note of condolence from Goering (Darré was -

bedridden for several months in 1936) he replied with inappropriate
condescension, congratulating Goering on his progress with the Four
Year Plan, assuring him of his support, and promising him the benefit
of his advice whenever necessary. He then set down his ‘considered
judgment of Backe’s faults. That he should do so to Goering, a Backe
supporter and keen opponent of himself, shows a lack of common
sense, and suggests a considerable isolation from ordinary human
relationships. Unlike Backe’s letters, Darré’s outpourings were smoothly
written and articulate, drafted, redrafted and polished, but their
contents were painfully misplaced and misdirected. Darré may have
realised this to some extent: there is an air of justifying himself before
posterity, regardless of the effect on his correspondent.®!

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The Nazi Minister

In his three-page attack on Backe, he praised his ‘academic
intelligence’, but criticised him for a lack of political awareness, this
supposedly a result of Backe’s Russian upbringing. The core of the
current argument was that Goering had asked Backe to collect some
statistical material from the RNS, and Darré, unable to produce it, had
flown into a rage. He had a genuine defence; collation of statistics had
been handed over to the National Statistics Office in order to avoid
duplication of effort. Peasants had complained that they were financing
a purely governmental activity via ‘their’ corporation. Each point that
Darré made in his own defence was logical, and, taken in isolation, even
relevant, but the absurdity of writing a droning, 16-page letter to a
busy Minister, one who was not noted for his tendency to study
documents closely, and one who would certainly not support the
writer on the matter concerned, displays, more clearly than all Darré’s
letters at this time, the reasons for his growing isolation.°2

He drafted his letters shut up alone in an office, insisting on the best
standard of typing, just as he insisted that his SS bodyguard should
always be the prescribed military distance behind him as he went to his
office. But contemporary photos and newsreel film show a soft-shelled,
uncertain exterior that could not have fooled his contemporaries.

Backe’s visit to Himmler at Tegernsee had occurred at a time when
Hitler was drafting the drive for economic self-sufficiency which was
later to become the Four Year Plan directive of 18th October 1936.
While Backe’s appointment divided the Ministry of Agriculture staff,
the memorandum of 4th September 1936 united them in a belief that
Hitler was at last relinquishing the shreds of the market, economy that
had persisted since 1933. Darré exulted that Hitler had ‘made a
thorough-going attack on economic liberalism which left Schacht
perplexed -and helpless’, while Backe heard from Paul Körner of the
Ministry of Economics on 7th September, announcing that Goering
had received ‘new guidelines for all our work’ from Obersalzburg.
Both men saw Hitler’s action as expressing a commitment to the
gebundene wirschaft, and the imminent break-up of the agrarian radicals
was halted. Backe felt that Hitler’s speech of 4th September—‘We are
not concerned with a bit of butter here, or more eggs there, our first
duty is to ensure that the broad masses of our people can work and
serve, and protect them against the horrible suffering of
unemployment’—was a ‘wonderful vindication of three years’ hard
work’. Even when addressing the Wehrmacht, Hitler took the
opportunity to emphasise the Socialist element, and Darré extracted the
juicy bits for Landpost:

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The Nazi Minister

No nationalism can really exist right now which is not
determined in a Socialist way by the Volk community. And no
one is a true National Socialist for whom the emphasis fails to
lie on the word ‘Socialist’. Here, in this concept, is what lends
impetus to our era.°?

Hitler’s apparent rejection of economic liberalism temporarily consoled
Darré for Backe’s rise to power, and both men had high expectations of
the proposed Four Year Plan. Darré hopefully compared Goering to
Friedrich List. The weakening world trade system, the growing threat
of sanctions against Germany, seemed to make autarky inevitable. ‘He
whom the world rejects must reject in return—because in the world
economy, goods can only be exchanged against goods’, wrote Backe,
However, this simple law held good within Germany, too, and
Goering’s management of the Four Year Plan failed to be the expected
bonanza for the agricultural sector. The council was not the expert
committee of unbiased technocrats which was the core of National
Socialist economic ideals. Backe complained that because of Goering’s
‘optimistic dictatorialness’, many important decisions made on paper
round the council table were never put into effect. The ‘same old party
hacks’ were appointed, instead of the council of experts. Furthermore,
Goering’s views of agricultural priorities were affected by an apparently
trivial matter: his devotion to the chase. Constant complaints from
farmers whose lands had been damaged by hunting landed on
Goering’s desk. This infuriated Goering, and gave him no reason to
share the Ministry of Agriculture’s commitment to a successful class of
small farmers. Goering, who had taken charge of the Forestry Office,
did create nature reserves and landscape protection areas in Germany,
many of which still exist. But his lack of sympathy towards the
agricultural sector was affected also by his dislike of Darré, whom he
considered an impractical mystic, Darré’s opposition to the large
landowners, of whom Goering was one, and, perhaps more
importantly, by his realisation that Hitler had lost interest in the
peasantry.°4

Backe’s own ideas for improving Germany’s food supply, including
land reclamation, the introduction of fish farms, increased
mechanisation, artificial fertiliser use, and so on, seldom received more
than a bored response around Goering’s council table. It was
impossible, he complained, to interest Hitler in silo building, or the
need for modernised dairy production. At one showpiece event, the
International Dairy Conference of August 1937, attended by academic

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The Nazi Minister

delegates from all over the world, Goering made a speech that left a
distasteful impression on the autarkic agrarian radicals:

No country can withdraw today from the world economic
system. No country can ever say again, we decline the world
economy, and are going to live and produce for ourselves
alone.°®

Nonetheless, Backe could share in the vision of a strong new Germany,
and had enough in common with the top Nazi leadership to be able to
co-operate with them in war preparations. Darr& could still produce
sensible, if long, policy documents on productivity and other practical
issues, but his known belief in de-industrialisation and massive social
change made it inevitable that he would be passed over by Hitler and
Goering, even if he had not begun to undergo a serious deterioration
in personality at this time. Backe, though, was admired and while
nobody was prepared to listen seriously to his proposals, there was a
general gut conviction that Backe, being a practical sort of man, could
definitely produce food when it became necessary. How, precisely,
would be his problem. Backe responded emotionally to this
expectation: dutifulness and the need to serve, to belong, drove him
on. ‘I have to force myself to work harder and harder, because I feel
the necessity of achievement,’ he wrote revealingly. ‘But Darré lacks
this discipline. I still have something to achieve, and I must live towards
it ... I have to go this way, even if the decay and ruin of my former
travelling companion Darré means that he can no longer walk with
me.66

But Darr& had not yet chosen the path to total retreat. On his
return from a long illness in January 1937, he appealed for loyalty. He
was aware of the problems of a division of authority, which had been
brought about by Backe’s role in the Four Year Plan council. The
fragile network of authority which strung together the RNS, the
Ministry of Agriculture and the peasant leader depended on the fact
that one man headed all three. Darré’s first act back in the office was to
circulate a memorandum calling for unity and support to Backe and
his colleagues. The support did not materialise, not because Darré’s staff
dislike him, but because they were genuinely perplexed as to whom to
obey. Several meetings called by Darré in February 1937 broke up in
disagreement, sometimes angrily dismissed by him. For example, one
meeting was convened to set up a.working party to discuss the
increases in productivity demanded by the plan. The group decided

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The Nazi Minister

that the marketing corporation was the most suitable instrument with
its established local network of farming experts. But Backe then
announced that while he could accept Darré as chief in his (Backe’s)
capacity as State Secretary, he could not do so as a member of the
General Council, and that this should be clarified as a preliminary to
any action which might be taken. Darré, with some justice, remarked
that one could not have two ministers running the same ministry, and
dismissed the meeting.°7”

Darré was now retreating into the National Food Estate, which he
saw as a bulwark against economic liberalism, that enemy to Blood
and Soil and the peasant ethic. Any attack on his own authority was
seen as an attack on its crucial role. He had the support of the lower-
level staff here, but proposals for improving its efficiency were ignored
by the four State Secretaries. It is an interesting comment on the
nature of the totalitarian dictatorship of the Third Reich that a man
with so many offices, titles and apparent power was as unable to
enforce cooperation from his civil service equivalents as would be a
minister in a democratic government. Darré argued that agriculture
faced problems that were insoluble because of extraneous factors. Two
bad harvests running had caused concern to the army. Germany’s
balance of trade was worsening, and rearmament was causing a
shortage of agricultural labour. No marketing system in the world
could cope with a shortage of land, men, machines and of produce.
Nor could these evils he remedied without structural change at the top;
the policies of Schacht and Goering would have to be altered.6®

Given his basic premises, this was a justified analysis. But Backe
considered the demand to be wholly unrealistic. Darré responded that to
attempt reform within an unsuitable political structure was unrealistic.
The result was that both men began first to suspect, then to despise the
other. While attacks from other party organs could still produce unity
(for example, Goering’s proposal for a grain monopoly in July 1937
found a united defence), more fundamental divisions between Darré and
the Nazi Party were beginning to surface. Backe tended to confine his
criticisms to Darré’s character, not understanding the psychology of a
man who could feel defeated from the outset, yet be unable to retire.
He blamed Darré for not approaching Hitler more often when the
RNS came under fire, attributing this diffidence to moral cowardice.
He decided that Darré was probably afraid of being ‘caught out’ in
factual questions, and preferred an isolation which Backe believed was
damaging the National Food Estate’s already precarious position.s®

It is true that Darre liked to rely on Backe to produce telling

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The Nazi Minister

statistics at short notice. On a visit to Italy before the war, Mussolini
asked both men what proportion of Germany’s population were
peasants. lt was Backe who returned the figure, one, after all,- crucial to
all Darré’s policies. Mussolini, incidentally, was horrified at the answer.
How could a nation produce enough food for itself if only 25% of its
nation were peasants, he asked rhetorically.”® But Darré’s hesitation
about approaching Hitler over the heads of other Reichsleiter was
because he had never enjoyed Hitler’s close confidence and trust since
the first meeting with him at Saaleck. At root, Darré was a one-issue
man, and he liked to use Backe as his front man, because he knew
how committed Backe was ideologically and emotionally, to National
Socialism, which he perceived as Hitler’s attempt to implement the
‘New Idea’ which he thought had germinated in the apparent collapse
of western capitalism after the First World War. This entailed a belief
that the survival of the National Socialist power structure was all-
important, while Darré retained sufficient objectivity to criticise the path
Germany was following. He had, after all, made a conscious decision
to use the NSDAP for his own beliefs back in 1930, and behind his
depression and lethargy of 1936-7, the flood of quarrelsome
memoranda, the endless drafts for letters designed to rescue
inconspicuous personal points of honour, lay his growing realisation
that he had made a terrible mistake.

His very successes of 1931-3 proved ruinous to his later political
manoeuvres. They gave him the impression that forthright aggression
would always triumph. The Christian Landbund leadership, the
Raiffeisen co-operatives, and all the other bodies which ‘had fallen like
ninepins under the combination of his infiltration programme and
peasant discontent, were a different problem from the Nazi leadership.
Men who ‘had been demoralised by war-time defeats and post-war
events, and who lived in the expectation of failure, could be bluffed
into defeat; Himmler, Goering and Hitler, with a record of success and
an ethic of complete ruthlessness, could not. Darré found that by 1937,
with the peasant vote no longer needed, he had lost his power base.
His wishes were circumvented or simply ignored.

Yet in many ways, this man, regarded now as a complete mystic, a
fantasist, a romantic and a dreamer, was fundamentally more clear-
sighted than the Nazis. He had never fitted in easily with institutions
and structures, and was unable to regard them as important. Probably
he underrated the value of the cohesion, continuity and security that
can arise from such bodies, but then that would have been a
conservative position, and Darré was not a conservative. He had seen

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The Nazi Minister

political frameworks undergo revolution, not just in 1933 but in 1918-
1919. They were not sacred. Radical change had occurred through
what seemed to him the general recognition of pressing necessity, and
he saw no reason why it should not happen again, when such a change
was clearly necessary to produce the desired effect. Governments were
merely man-made, and subject to variation at human will; the laws of
agricultural productivity, of historical development, were not.

An example of this attitude is Darré’s apparently irrelevant
canvassing of the need for organic farming during the 1930s and 1940s.
Backe was irritated by Darré’s insistence on a long-term policy to
improve the humus content of Germany’s soil (‘Darré muttering
about organic farming’), and continued to call for nitrogenous fertiliser
to be made available for agriculture. Supply failed to improve.
Nitrogen was actually a net export during the war, and productivity
dropped after a war-time peak of 1943. If his arguments had been
heeded, a long-term programme of soil improvement could have been
put into effect in the late 1930s, and helped agricultural production
during the straitened war years.7!

Another ideological divide became apparent in the emergence of
Germany’s territorial ambitions. Although it might seem obvious in
hindsight that National Socialist Germany would be forced to seek
foreign conquests—to obtain raw materials, to fulfil party promises, to
relieve inflationary pressures—Darré seems to have believed that he
could influence the party away from its militarist as well as its urban
elements, perhaps because his point of contact in early Nazi days had
been the peasant-oriented Thuringian branch. Darré was not to support
the invasion of Russia, and he was equally shocked by the Ribbentrop-
Molotov Pact, which he thought gave too much strategic land and
railway access to Russia, and displayed over-Machiavellian cunning on
Hitler’s part. Darré protested to Hitler in 1937 when the latter began to
talk of his Russian ambitions: he would confine settlement projects to
German territory, together with settling East Prussia and the Baltic
area more heavily with German farmers. “The Ostsee is our imperium’,
he argued, and was an early supporter of the return of the ethnic
Germans from Russia for German settlement.72

His support for the Four Year Plan as a ‘blow to liberal economic
thinking’ faltered when the link between autarky and preparations for
war became clear. War meant the ‘non-agricultural economy’. In 1936,
the outcome of what was seen as a choice between full-scale ‘foreign
adventurism’ and the controlled economy seemed uncertain, and Darré

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The Nazi Minister

speculated as to whether Goering would go one way or the other. But
when policy appeared more defined, Darré wrote that he would ‘lay
aside my earlier source of strength, the belief that I was working for a
German Revolution, as an idealistic Utopia’, and in April 1939, ‘As a
result of our foreign policy, there is such a brutal, heavy industrial
economic imperialism abroad, which makes one anxious for Blood and
Soil ideals—Germany a colossus with feet of clay ... the Protectorate
will be a failure without some common tie of blood [Blutgedanke]’.
These are phrases which spell out clearly the inherent opposition of
national to imperial ideas.79

On the other hand, although Darré had fairly consistently
conceptualised his ideal state, and could see where Nazi Germany’s
developments opposed it, he had failed to think through the problems
of achieving that ideal state while not destroying the ideals in the
process. The problems of revolutionary aims versus revolutionary
methods has perturbed political revolutionaries from Plato to Lenin,
and is too large a problem to analyse here. Nonetheless, it is fair to ask
exactly where Darré thought the ‘Baltic’ ended, and what kind of
struggle he envisaged in order to gain control of it. How did he
imagine the Ostsee was going to be made available to German peasants
without creating the necessary tools for achieving the task? How was
war to be limited to acquisition of the Baltic? Not just factories,
tractors, nitrogen, tanks, aircraft, but the war machine capable not
merely of conquest but of the resettlement of an already occupied
territory, together with the sustenance and subsequent development of
the settlers—all were to be provided from a home base. poor in raw
materials. It should have been clear that the very process of conquest
would have corrupted the conquerors; that the men who were to carve
out a living from the land for the sake of Blood and Soil would have
found it hard to resist the spoils of war. The very faults that Darré had
diagnosed in German society, the unco-operative, vulpine
competitiveness, the tendency to retreat to a deliberately unintuitive
bureaucracy, the loss of faith and sense of defeat among German
farmers, could only be enhanced by his prescriptions.

There were three areas where Darré was prepared to ‘go to Hitler’ —
if he could force him to receive him—and these were peasant
settlement, the shortage of agricultural labourers, and organic farming.
He was given short shrift on all three.”* Soon after the first
agricultural legislation of 1933, Darré called for a voluntary code among
farmers, through which labourers would be provided with a
smallholding by their employers, in exchange for one day’s work a

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week. The labourer’s holding was supposed to be large enough for
self-sufficiency. Darré wrote at this time that the ‘new modemity’ lay in
farming units which were designed to produce the maximum self-
sufficiency, because the day of mechanised cash crop farming was over.
In 1937, he called for a halt to industrial expansion, and in July, visited
Hitler to discuss the ‘catastrophic shortage of farm labour’. He
suggested either importing ethnic Germans to work as agricultural
labourers, or slowing down industrial expansion. He wanted legislation
to stop the Landflucht, the flight from the land, but Backe and
Himmler, who were present at the meeting with Hitler, were
contemptuous. Darré continued to write memoranda attacking the
importation of Polish labourers. The thought of bringing in Poles to

fill the place of German peasants who had gone to the factories was ~

intolerable to him. It was a bitter irony that a party which he had
joined to further the peasant cause should preside over its apparent
destruction. One historian calls Darré’s diagnosis of this issue ‘as
realistically based as its conclusions were unrealisable; to cut arms
production drastically, to remove inflationary overheating from the
economy’. This description could be applied to many of Darré’s
campaigns: realistically based, but ungealisable.75

Hans Kehrl records a speech given by Darré in April 1937 to an
educational conference. He bemused an originally sympathetic audience
by discussing ‘philosophical theory’ in an ‘unclear and wordy fashion’,
losing the interest and sympathy of his listeners. Hitler was reported to
have complained about Darré’s 1937 speech at Goslar. “The peasants
certainly aren’t interested in listenmg to all that peasant philosophy

stuff. Darré had obviously lost his political instinct. His preoccupation

with theory reflected his knowledge of the failure of his mission, his
realisation that his convictions were no longer shared by others, and his
need to persuade them.7®

For Backe, public alignment with Darré was now an
embarrassment, although he was well aware that agricultural
productivity increase was faltering in the late 1930s. He did not take
part in Darré’s fight for the abolitiom of the entailed estate in 1938. The
abolition of the entail was another paper victory for Darré, and
probably a gesture made to the radical agricultural sector by Hitler in a
year in which Party unity was particularly needed. Darré saw his law as
a threat to the Junkers, and so did they. They flooded him with social
invitations, and for two months, while Darré drafted the law, he was
wined and dined by various members of the nobility. He even received
invitations to meet Goering at the Karinhall. He agreed with Goering

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to provide a protection clause for private forests, to prevent their
division and sale. Goering then sided with Darré at a meeting with the
Justice Ministry, and against Giirtner, agreeing that ‘dynasties should not
be put into cold storage.’77

Hitler signed the law of 6th July 1938, but it is doubtful if he
would have done so if he had expected the Fidei-Kommissgesetz to
create havoc among the large landowners. After all, the entail had
prevented the full utilisation of land. Entails meant pensions, provisions
for care of dependants, obligations to families and employees. The new
law’s provisions for compensation for the loss of legal interests in the
property were designed to ensure that the estate remained a viable
farming unit. If the holder of a life interest could not be compensated
without stripping the estate of some resource necessary to its
productivity, then the holder went without compensation. This was
the extent to which the law envisaged the need to maintain the estates

-as viable production units. As argued earlier, the effect of this law was

to remove the vestiges of neo-feudal community obligations, and
institute maximum flexibility of tenure and alienability of land. If the
law had been a real blow to large farmers, it is doubtful whether
Hitler and Goering would have agreed to it. In 1933 the large estates
had been poor, ripe for bankruptcy. An attack on the entail then
would have meant forced sales, sub-division and settlement. By 1939,
most large farms were more profitable, and land prices had risen.
Despite the fact that Darré regarded this law as his last achievement, a
final blow against his enemies the capitalist, anti Blood and Soil
landowners, all it did (or would have done if the ‘war had not
intervened) was to force them into more market-oriented behaviour
than before. Hitler in August 1939 spoke to his assembled generals of
the ‘devastating food crisis that could grip Germany within a few
years’, and may well have seen the Entailed Estates Law as a means of
increasing food production.7®

This brief moment in the sun helped Darré to pull himself together,
and for a few months relations with Backe and his staff were
harmonious. The constant notes issuing from his office were addressed
to ‘Dear Herbert’: he visited the Backes at their farm, and stood
Godfather to Backe’s son. Hitler had expressed pleasure when the
1937-8 harvest was seen to be a good one, and told Darré that such a
harvest was worth twenty-two divisions to him. Although the
‘achievement’, insofar as the improved harvest was a result of
governmental activity, belonged more properly to Backe, Hitler
tactfully applied the compliment to Darré, and indeed, as far as overseas

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visitors were concerned, Darré still had the title and dignity: of minister.
He was invited by Hitler to meet the Italian agricultural minister, and
they planned in advance what to say to him. ‘Refer him to Hungary
for extra food’, was Hitler’s advice. “We’ve got enough troubles of our
own’. Darré received the Hungarian and Rumanian agricultural
ministers in early 1939, while in July 1939 he organised his last
International Congress of Agriculture held in Germany, and was
flattered by the attendance of the Polish agricultural minister. Indeed,
encouraged by his success with the Entailed Estates Law, he began to
draft a new law in conjunction with Backe and Dr R. Harmening, the
RNS’s legal adviser, to create a new ministry which would combine

the Agricultural and Economics Ministries into one vast planning and

marketing organisation.”?? .

Darré intended this proposed corporation to be the RNS writ large.
By re-organising industrial production on the lines of a co-operative
marketing system with fixed prices, agricultural price stability would
be made easier, and industry gradually brought to see the virtues of
corporatism. Backe agreed. He felt that the Four Year Plan council was
failing to mobilise German’s resources in sufficient quantity, and lacked
organisational ability. More concentrated effort was needed, more
efficiency and more productivity. One centralised planning department
should replace the existing jumble of authorities. He could not see how
Germany could win the forthcoming campaigns unless this
disorganisation and sloth, as he described it after the war, was shaken
off. The difference of attitude here was significant, with Darré thinking
in terms of long-term reform, and Backe of the approaching conflict.
In any case, unknown to Darré, the last props of his authority were
being pulled out from under him. The one programme which was at
the heart of his ideas—agricultural settlement—was threatened, and
during 1939 the crucial transition of power to Himmler took place,
which will be discussed in the next chapter.®°

Backe responded to the prospect of conquest by reverting to his
early Göttingen ideas about the need to colonise Russia’s grain
producing areas. He envisaged a restructured Europe, one unit from
Brittany to the Urals, dominated by a strong Germany, and reasonably
self-sufficient in food and raw material production. Russia would be
Europe’s ‘bread-basket’. Both Backe’s geo-political analysis and his
devotion to the geographer and economist J. von Thiinen (who
developed a theory regarding efficient use of land resources based an
closeness to markets) led him to disregard existing nation-state
boundaries in planning the future Europe. Backe’s study of Russia in

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the mid-1920s led him to predict the imminent collapse of the
economy, and a decline in agricultural production. He rightly expected
the Soviets to concentrate on industrial development rather than on
improving agricultural infrastructure. He remarked that in the course
of neglecting agriculture for industry Russian agriculture would be
starved of resources, while industry could never develop in Russia
because of the inadequacies of the population. Russian lack of
creativity and initiative, together with Russian sado-masochistic
attitudes to their rulers, going back to Ivan the Terrible, meant that
Western-style industrial development could never succeed without the
introduction of more creative and competent outsiders. The Germans,
in fact, would act as an amalgam of colonists, managerial executives
and studs. Russia deserved invasion, because her attempt to industrialise
was tantamount to an act of war against the West. Her ordained role
was to produce food for Europe. These arguments marched with
Hitler’s, and the fact that the renowned expert on world food
production and on Russia propounded them, must have been a factor
in his eventual invasion plans.®!

In 1942, Backe was to have his thesis on Russian grain production
finally published, along with a work on Europe’s food balances. He
wrote admiringly in 1943 that ‘the Russian Bolsheviks cling on to their
culture’. He was not a man to look for deliberate revenge for his
treatment at the hands of the Russians between 1910 and 1918, but it
certainly affected his view of them. None the less, his tough line seems
to have been a result of his obsessive sense of identification with what
he saw as German interests, a longing for large-scale, orderly planning,
and a paternalist sense of duty, rather than a result of innate brutality.
He had a strong instinct that the Germans were a defenceless, sacrificial
entity (‘We are the victims and not the creators of this world’) who
had to be protected, if necessary, through ruthless and revolutionary
action. His Spartan ethic applied to himself as well as others. He
refused to allow his wife to remove their belongings from Berlin
during the worst of the bombing, because it would ‘set a bad example
to others’, and refused her permission to travel to Berlin to see him in
1945 because the trains were ‘needed for carrying refugees’. In fact,
given the lack of apologies produced by most countries during their
period of expansion or imperialism, an interesting question might to
why so many German felt obliged to rationalise and excuse their
aggressive policy during the war. Backe brooded throughout the war
on an ‘it’s either them or us’ line of argument, but he never faced up
to the crucial misjudgment he had made regarding Russian food

The Nazi Minister

producing capacities, a misjudgment that may have been due to the
fact that, like many Russian experts during the 1930s, who had left
Russia before 1920, at a time of relative plenty, he had very little idea
just how disastrous the effects of the collectivisation programme had
been. 8?

In January 1941, Backe produced a report on Russia’s food
producing capacity which estimated a potential far greater than the
two million tons of grain Germany was receiving under the
Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Backe told Goering he was prepared to
guarantee the report’s accuracy, and Goering showed it to Hitler, on
whom it apparently had a ‘decisive effect’. On 30th May, Backe flew
to Obersalzberg to confer with Hitler, Lammers, Bormann and Keitel
(Darré was excluded) over the invasion plan and Backe’s prediction that
‘every country in Europe could share the Kornkammer’. The
responsibility for preparing food stocks and ration cards for the war
with Russia was given to Backe, who was under orders to keep the
whole thing secret from Darré (‘row with Darré over secrecy of Russian
preparations’, his wife noted.)§?

Secrecy was now carried to considerable lengths as far as Darré was
concerned: clearly, he was no longer trusted. Bormann, especially, had
become an enemy. Darré despised Bormann’s uncouthness, and his ill-
treatment of women. Bormann distrusted Darré, and especially his
commitment to organic farming, and, by implication, the

Anthroposophists. Even before the invasion of Poland, Darré had been

unable to gain Hitler’s ear. His memos piled up unread on Hitler’s
desk, but after 1939 his continual and open hostility produced not just
mockery from Goering and Goebbels but exclusion from political
life.84

One constant correspondent, Erich Dwinger, a best-selling 1920s
novelist who bought a farm in 1930 (the self-imposed silence of the
internal &migr& did not prevent him from flooding the National Food
Estate with suggestions on farming and food policy throughout the
1930s), records a visit to Darré in April 1942, and described his
‘somewhat too fleshy face, the eyes which had something in them of
the animal at bay, the well cut suit’, and Darré’s reiteration that he was
now a powerless man, and had been for some three years. Darré
confirmed to Dwinger that the Russian invasion was unnecessary for
Germany’s food supply, but displayed instead ‘naked imperialism’
which would ‘finish off the peasantry’.®° He was permitted to sit in his
office and keep the title of Minister, but it was on paper only. From
1939, Backe was described as acting head of the Ministry in its annual

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budget. It took Darr& two or three years to grasp his position fully. He
kept up a sporadically friendly correspondence with Backe, warning
him over Bormann in 1940, and sending him a long review of his own
book, written in the friendliest. of terms, in 1941. Backe, having
achieved some autonomy at last, felt compassion towards him. After
all, Darré had been his ideological mentor for some years, and on
occasion Darré’s concentration on far-reaching plans still seemed
admirable rather than ridiculous. He commented that ‘Goering is
realistic but not good on fundamentals (grundsätzlich): Darr& is the
reverse’, but none the less, blamed Darré for ‘the fact that the peasantry
were in an ever weaker situation’ when faced with ‘sarcasm over his
pessimism and the peasantry in general’ from Goering and Funk. Even
as late as 1940, Hitler tried to pacify Backe over Darré, and called a
meeting with the Ministry of Agriculture staff where, after
congratulating Backe on his organisation of rationing, he asked him to
compromise with Darré (who was currently campaigning against an
agricultural study undertaken by the Ministry of Agriculture). Backe
refused bluntly. He told Hitler that there was no point in trying to
reconcile the conflicts caused by the virtual incorporation of the RNS
National Food Estate into the Ministry of Agriculture, and Darré’s
resentment of the fact.8®

When Goering issued a decree on 13th January 1941, concerning
meat rations, the fact was kept from Darré until well into February. An
angry correspondence with Backe ensued. Darré continued to circulate
indignant memos and notes, and in June 1941 another row erupted,
when in front of other staff he accused Backe of secrecy over the
Russian preparations. Backe answered caustically that bureaucratic
formalities were unimportant, and only realities mattered, a heavy
blow at a man who equally disliked bureaucratic formalities, but,
having been their victim, had tried to manipulate them against others.
He refused to sign the rationing decree issued in April 1941. Backe
reluctantly visited him in person to try to get the necessary signature,
and Darré took the opportunity to try to explain his point of view. He
complained that his task had been to rescue the peasantry, not to
prepare them for war. 1933 had been a year of victory for the
National Food. Estate, but the Führer had diverted the nation’s
energies into building Autobahnen and other rubbish. Blood and Soil
was a lost cause, but so was the war; the concessions made to Russia in
the 1939 Pact had lost Germany the war with Russia before it started.
‘He looked terrible, nose red, reading and muttering’ noted Backe in
an angry outburst. ‘What he does not realise is that it is he who is

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The Nazi Minister

shattered, not his work ... still, it’s my problem now.’ He: went on to
attack Darré harshly as a gambler and schemer, a worthless man who—
and this was obviously the key to the attack—was trying to ‘ascribe his
own inadequacies to the Fiihrer ... that Genius. I feel an unspeakable
contempt for him’, concluded Backe. ‘To attack Hitler ... 1 myself am
only a talent. I am happy to be a second-in-command, to work
without personal ambition for the greatest .... In that I am completely
Prussian.’ ,

The very next morning Backe clarified his position still further, by
describing a meeting with Heydrich and Landfried on the problems of
raw materials. ‘I was filled with joy to find that Heydrich was fighting
for Nazi ideals. We were bound together, without. a word being

spoken.’ But Himmler would ‘collapse just like Darré, within three `

years at the latest; no accident that they were friends for so long’, a
prophecy that was to be fulfilled almost to the day.*”

The link with Heydrich was not fortuitous. Backe felt a strong
sense of community with him. He considered that they both suffered
from capricious, vacillating, inefficient superiors in the shape of Darré
and Himmler, a point also made by Heydrich’s biographer. Both men
placed their undoubted intellectual gifts at the service of a belief in
planning as an aim in itself. The essential voidness of the concept, the
impracticality of dictatorial technocracy, was obscured by the energy
of the commitment. Backe’s admiration of and comradeship towards
Heydrich also reflects his sense that ‘Nazi ideals’ were lacking in their
immediate peers. Two years later he wrote with regretful admiration
of Franz Hayler, then Leiter des Einzelhandels, that he was ‘Nazi and
young and unbroken’. This suggests that ‘unbroken’ Nazi radicals were
becoming thin on the ground. Shortly before Heydrich’s assassination
he was charged with investigating Backe, because of the latter’s link
with the Skald, and is supposed to have sent a message to Backe on his
deathbed to the effect that he had cleared him of any disloyalty. This
meant a great deal to Backe.®8

Darré in 1940-1 attempted to fight back where’ he felt the
seriousness of a situation demanded it, but lacked the nervous strength
to put his case convincingly. He suspected that Backe was wildly
overstating the figures on prospective grain production, and kept
badgering the Ministry of Agriculture staff for clarification on this
issue. He realised from bitter experience that Backe believed his own
propaganda, the statistics which Darré feared were unreliable. ‘Figures
given to Goering as “political” figures were somehow transformed
into “statistical” figures’, he noted bewildered in August 1941. In 1939

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The Nazi Minister

and in 1940, he had sent reports to Hitler alleging that Backe had
falsified food reserve figures, and managed to reach Briickner, an
adjutant to Hitler, in 1940, attacking both the Four Year Plan
prognosis of food production and Backe’s prediction of food
production in Russia and Germany. It seems true that Backe was
prepared to bend the truth if necessary to convince Goering of the
rightness of his plans. He was working all hours on the task of
estimating Germany’s food stocks and choosing National Food Estate
personnel to take over Ukrainian collective farms. He feared that the
effect of the invasion had not been worked out in terms of its effect on
Germany’s arms production potential.®?

The food situation in Russia was to be a disaster from Germany's
point of view. Backe had little idea of how badly forcible
collectivisation had affected conditions in the Ukraine, or that the grain
sent to Germany by Russia in 1939 and 1940 had had to be squeezed
out of a near starving peasantry by force. Now, together with the
damage they themselves had caused during the advance, the German
armies found scorched earth—literally—and burnt crops. ‘The further
east, the worse the situation; nothing harvested, nothing in order—the
Russian. harvest uncertain, the Russians almost starving. In Germany,
potatoes and sugar beet lying under the snow’. The vast grain reserves

‘the Germans had expected to find in Russia were simply not there. By

December 1941, Backe could note that ‘the entire eastern army must
be fed from Germany’, at a time when the Ruhr potato crop had been
ruined by frost. Backe’s ‘pragmatism’ was shown up by this reversal of
expectations. His policy over collective farms was that they had to be
retained to avoid diminished food production in case the changeover
caused chaos. It was a mistaken decision. Agricultural productivity did
not pick up in the Ukraine until concessions were made to the peasants
in 1942-3, but by then, the army was retreating, leaving huge
quantities of tractors, gasohol plants and silos rusting on railway
stations and on the steppes. If one is to judge from Russian reports of
their endless agricultural disasters since the war, some, indeed, may be
lying there today.°°

These were the errors of an ideologue: a National Socialist totally
committed to a credo which relied on the ethic of the
Volksgemeinschaft. Backe, the archetypal National Socialist, underrated
the speed with which people, even soil-bound farmers, even Russians,
could respond to financial incentive. Since he envisaged a society
fuelled by self-sacrifice and duty to the community, it is not surprising.

Darré was formally demoted in 1942 as Minister of Agriculture, and

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Backe took over as ‘leader of the ministry’. Remaining true to his
Spartan values, he refused the title of ‘Minister’ until 1944. Both men
had been uprooted and declassé. Both had unused and wasted abilities.
In a time full of ironies, it is perhaps one of the deepest that Darré, the
vain, difficult, unco-operative, intriguing politician, should have stuck
to his beliefs, and that his prescriptions should so often have been the
right ones, given Germany’s position. Backe, the more upright,
honourable and straightforward man, presided over the mass
destruction of German agriculture, and witnessed the looting and
expropriation of all farmers, large and small, by the Russian invaders
he had always feared, in 1945. Trusted by Hitler to the last, he was

nominated to the D6nitz cabinet of April 1945. In 1947, he committed.

suicide after several months of solitary confinement. A letter which
reached him shortly before his death told him of the sufferings in the
eastern zone of some of his closest friends under the Russians. It must
have seemed 1917 all over again. .
Darré, the stubborn individualist, went on to fight his corner till his
death in 1953. In politics, as in art, ends and means, the virtue of the
performer and the virtue of the end result, are strangely unrelated.

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am tannin acta tesa,

a in nu

CHAPTER SIX

‘The Praetorian Guard led by a Jesuit’

WAS DARRE GUILTY?

Four years after the war, in what became known as the Wilhelmstrasse
trial, Darré was found guilty of the plunder; spoliation, enserfment and
expropriation of ‘hundreds of thousands of Polish and Jewish farmers’.
In view of the fact that he was Minister of Agriculture in name only
during the relevant period, was this verdict a miscarriage of justice?

In chapter Three, the concept of Blood and Soil was discussed in
relation to intra-German racialism. It was argued there that Darré’s
concern was with rescuing a threatened minority from decay and
possible extinction. Nonetheless, Darré seems to have presided, if in a
titular fashion, over the resettlement of the ethnic Germans, the
Volksdeutsche, in western Poland. He was the formal head of the

‘ministry until 1942, and it was men from that ministry and from the

National Food Estate (now incorporated into the ministry) who were
sent out as civilian administrators under the military and SS aegis of
the Wehrmacht and Himmler, to aid the Resettlement Corps in
Poland. Furthermore, Darré had been head of the sinister-sounding SS
Race and Settlement Head Office until 1938, and took a close interest
in it during the 1930s, even soliciting funds for it in 1932 to fulfil his
‘new nobility’ visions. Although Darré tried to resign from the SS in
1938, but was prevented from doing so by Hitler’s order, it is still a
reproach against Darréan ideology that his visions of a peasant nation
led inexorably to imperial plunder and land seizure; that agrarian
fervour ‘started Green and ended Bloody-red’, in Tucholsky’s phrase,
and that the close tie with the SS seems to confirm this allegation.

The following two chapters discuss this issue. The first looks at the
inception and structure of the SS Race and Settlement Office, and
argues that it was at first a cardboard edifice, not nearly as important
as its name suggests, and that early SS settlement was peripheral, a
matter of a few part-time volunteers trying to sneak men and resources
past the National Food Estate Settlement Office, and helping to build
haystacks in Frisia. SS settlement outside Germany was from 1938, and

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‘The Praetorian Guard led by a Jesuit’

took place without Darré’s consent and above his head, after a series of
complex manoeuvrings. An important turning-point in the power of
the SS was the creation of the first SS Land Office in Prague, so while
these institutional details are regrettably Byzantine, they are essential to
an understanding of the underlying issues.

Chapter Seven looks at the details of ethnic German resettlement,
and examines the extent to which Darré and his ideology were relevant
to this improvised programme. During the early part of the war, plans
were appearing and disappearing like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in
Wonderland, and internal arguments about competence were proceeding
among different SS offices, with Himmler holding the ring between

them. It does emerge that some part of Darré’s ideas had percolated |

through to the SS managerial level, especially where the social
reformist, well educated intellectuals were concerned, but it seems that
this process was indirect, and involved a rejection of what was seen as
outdated romanticism. What came to be at stake was the belief, simple
and non-ideological, that truly to possess a territory, it had to be
settled by the possessors. Twentieth-century history amply
demonstrates that this belief was not confined to the SS. So here, as in
the question of agricultural productivity, it was the practical, populist
element in Darré’s ideology that survived.

The basic difference between Darré and Himmler was that Darré was
a racial tribalist, and Himmler an imperialist with romantic racial
overtones. Darré took seriously his own analysis that a nation could
only be built upon an organic link between soil and Volk, but

Himmler dreamed of a Greater German empire. While Darré had

originated the Hegehof idea (later to be modified into Himmler’s
Wehrbauern concept), he had intended it as the basis for restructuring
German society, not as a means of creating a ruling class for an
Empire, or rewarding successful generals. 1

Darré had to go, not only because he lacked the ruthlessness to
implement Himmler’s plans, but because he had come to realise that
his dream of a peasant nation had little to do with Himmler’s plans for
the SS, the ‘Praetorian Guard under Jesuit leadership’, as he described it
in 1938.7 In some ways, the SS-State envisaged by Himmler had also
moved from the original image of the NSDAP. Hitler, especially in his
speeches, had presented National Socialism as the creation of the
Greater Germany, purged of its alien and treacherous elements, a vision
which could be perceived as an extension and fulfulment of nineteenth-
century nationalism, This was what seems to have attracted the support

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Br | 7

_ ‘The Praetorian Guard led by a Jesuit’

of the majority of Germans.? Himmler’s vision of the pan-European
state, with a German and Germanised administrative elite, demanded
the creation of a new kind of man to rule it.. The ideal SS-man would
be linked with the land, but would understand technology, and have:
mastered it. He would be efficient, able and unhampered by ties of
class. This plan to create an élitist superman, which in many people’s
minds today is synonymous with National Socialism, was arguably
different in kind from the cosy Volksgemeinschaft image presented by
the NSDAP during its early years. It is interesting that even as late as
1940, Himmler thought it necessary to keep his plans a secret. Where
the NSDAP’s emphasis on community feeling exposed its real lack in
Germany, Himmler’s training and organisational methods managed
within a few years to create a tightly knit and loyal group of skilled
technocrats, together with a disciplined and skilful fighting force in the
mature Waffen SS.

Between 1936 and 1939, the SS’s position in agriculture was weak,
even though SS indoctrination emphasised the peasantry and rural
life.* The 1939 plan to resettle the Volksdeutsche’ in the newly
incorporated areas of the Warthegau, Posen, Danzig-West Prussia,
Upper Silesia and Zichenau produced major alterations in the agrarian
administrative structure, as detailed arrangements to settle the returning

ethnic Germans took precedence over internal agrarian settlement.

During 1940, a mere 619 new holdings were established within
Germany, whereas some 35,000 farms were created for the
Volksdeutsche.®

Whereas the Sudetenland appears to have beei. absorbed by
German agricultural institutions without significant change, the war in
Poland in 1939 produced a different order of priorities into the
thinking of ambitious and/or competent officials. Konrad Meyer, ex-
Ministry of Agriculture official and land planning expert, who took
over Himmlers land planning office in Berlin for the
Reichskommissariat für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums (RKFDV),
indicated this conflict and the agrarian lobby’s awareness of their loss of
status at the end of the peacetime period, when he describes how RNS
officials became demoralised as

the static model of Darré’s peasant policy became deeply affected
by industrial and economic growth. Only defensive answers
were given to critical questions. A resigned attitude reigned.”

At the same time, the SS were growing visibly in power and

influence, and as a result, many members of the agrarian departments

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‘The Praetorian Guard led by a Jesuit

joined Himmler’s new commissariat, the RKFDV, hoping to find
there the same values that had inspired Darré. Himmler also recruited
intellectuals of the traditional German nationalist variety, such as Dr
Kummer, head of the Ministry of Agriculture Settlement Department,
and ex-adviser to the Society for Internal Colonisation, together with
Meyer; men who aimed at ‘restoring the pre-1918 status quo’.® For
them, the Volksdeutsche re-settlement was a matter of terminating what
the Versailles Treaty had begun, sorting out the twenty-three major
linguistic groups stretching from the Baltic to Greece.

Securing German expansion to the East had been a red thread in
German politics; during the First World War, Max Sering, for

example, widely regarded as a liberal intellectual, and certainly not a .

Nazi supporter in later years, produced a detailed plan in 1915 to
establish 250,000 German peasant settlements in Courland.
Arrangements were made with Baltic landowners to give up a third of
their land for this purpose after the war. The loss of what became
Lithuania after 1918 ended the programme.? In 1917, a Vereinigung für
deutsche Siedlung und Wanderung aimed at settling German peasants
from the Russian interior in the Baltic lands then occupied by
Germany. Dr Stumpfe, a member of the Prussian Agricultural
Ministry, suggested ‘solving the German-Polish problem’ by an
exchange of population: Poles in Germany against Germans in
what was then ‘Russian Poland’.1° There was apparently little
difference between the earlier plans to repopulate the east with German
peasants and Himmler’s vaguely worded proposals of 1939 and 1940,

with the exception of the proposed division of Poland into the |

General-Gouvernement (G-G), a sort of racial dustbin, and the
Incorporated Areas, which were to be German, Germanic and/or
Germanised.!! This appearance of continuity has to be borne in mind
if one is to understand the enthusiasm with which sincere followers
of Darré, the peasant radical, altered course to follow Himmler the
imperialist, and further, the extent to which Himmler was subjected
to pressure from his staff on the issue of German and Volksdeutsche
settlement.

Many of the institutional conflicts continued between SS Offices,
party officials, Goering’s Four Year Plan Council, and the OKW,}2
while disagreements about relative productivity levels took on a new
urgency under the demands of the war economy, and the need to feed
troops as well as civilians from occupied territory. The SS agricultural
planning staff took over not merely the personnel, but the
controversies involved. One important point, however, is that serious

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_ The Praetorian Guard led by a Jesuit’

SS involvement in the settlement programme did not occur until 1939,
The extent and depth of its activity in this area has been exaggerated in
later histories, partly because of SS power during the war, and partly
because of the apparent continuity signalled by the existence of the SS
RuSHA during the 1930s, a body whose level of activity at that time
did not correspond with its grandiose title.13 Other bodies were
concerned with the change in authority from the Ministry of
Agriculture to SS organisations, notably the RKFDV, but also the
Hitler Youth Land Service, the Berlin Land Office, the Vo-Mi Stelle
and the Prague and Austrian Land Offices.

Koehl describes in his monograph on German resettlement policy
the methods by which Himmler organised SS infiltration into
Volksdeutsche agencies, to win control of ethnic German settlement, and
to persuade Hitler that he was the most suitable man to control the
programme.!* This resulted in the Führer Decree of 7th October
1939, which established the Reichskommissariat,!5 and although the
Decree did leave control of ‘settlement by farmers’ in the hands of the
Ministry of Agriculture (possibly due to Herbert Backe’s influence),
Himmler’s role as Reichskommissar gave him the chance, which he
utilised to the full, of dominating German resettlement activity in

eastern Europe.*®

This decree saw a final breach in Darré’s relations with Himmler.
Up to 1936, the two men had been friends, Backe, in fact, blamed
Darré for inciting a romantic streak in Himmler’s character,17 and the
two men did share a common enthusiasm for pre-Christian Germanic
religions, traditions and myths. However, Darré’s growing alienation
from the party leadership, and Himmler’s tendency to range himself
with the existing powers (anyone who could move from being
Strasser’s devoted secretary, to Darré, to organising the Sicherheitdienst
and SIPO in eight years certainly demonstrated ideological flexibility),
emphasised a profound gulf in the ideas of the two men. Between 1919
and 1931, agrarian ideology seems not to have touched Himmler’s
political life. He was to all intents and purposes the perfect
bureaucrat.!* The process of ousting Darré had begun in 1936, when
Himmler decided that SS settlement should be an independent
matter,?9 while 1938 began with pressure from Himmler on Darré to
resign his position as head of the Race and Settlement Office (RuSHA)
a step which Darré considered a ‘wound in the flank of the peasant
struggle, a disaster for the peasants’.2° He resigned in February 1938. In
March 1939, Pancke, under Himmler’s orders, successfully ousted the
Ministry of Agriculture from effective control of land in the

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‘The Praetorian Guard led by a Jesuit’

Sudetenland, the reason given being, interestingly enough, that a
successful SS settlement programme there would lend weight to an SS
takeover. of the same programme in Germany.?! In other words, as
late as March 1939 the programme of agricultural settlement within
Germany was still seen as a tempting prize, a mean of creating an SS,
land-based élite.

Where most Nazis dreamed simply of revising the German border
to what it had been before 1918, Himmler had greater plans. Not only
were five to six million Poles and Jews to be evacuated to Restpolen,
not only were the Volksdeutsche to be resettled in the incorporated
areas, but the whole of the east was to become a substitute to Germany

for her lost colonies. In a speech in October 1940, Himmler attacked .

what he called ‘ivory tower concepts of colonies, of open doors and
new homelands’. Instead, the east was to be an economic area, a source
of raw materials to be developed according to Germany’s needs. After
the war, new cities, industries and farms would be built under SS
leadership.?2

In trying to trace the genesis of Himmler’s later career, historians
have struggled with a paucity of material; there are early diaries, two
brief articles published before 1933, an undated article on farming, and
the probable part-authorship of the NSDAP Manifesto on Agriculture
of 1930. One diary entry by Himmler does refer to possible emigration
to the East,2? and some writers have tried to see a continuity between
this entry, his alleged membership of the Artamanen group in 1931, and
the planned SS state of 1940. This interpretation suggests that

Himmler, having been strongly influenced by Darré in the early 1930s, .

then proceeded to carry out Darré’s programme, while discarding Darré
the man.24 However, an analysis of the planning documents and
organisational struggles within the SS between 1938 and 1942
demonstrate that while agrarian ideology of a Darréan nature strongly
influenced SS members at middle and lower levels, their attempts to
implement peasant settlement were frequently delayed and even halted
by Himmler, because Himmler was set on the potential empire in
Russia, and subordinated ideological aims to power struggles. As with
Darré, Himmler wanted agriculture to play an important role after the
war; but his main purpose, to alter the demographic, political and
geographic map of Europe, should be differentiated from Darré’s
Germanic Bauernreich. Himmler’s plan was to develop the east into a
mightly industrial empire, to re-afforest the steppes and mine the raw
materials, using a helot class of Poles and Jews, tucked away in Russia.
Himmler’s wartime planning documents, while not of very great value

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‘The Praetorian Guard led by a Jesuit’

in determining the course of events, are certainly of value in
determining his intentions. We know from his subordinates that all
such documents had to have his line-by-line consent.25 They
demonstrate that apart from the stress on the desirability of a medium-
sized farm structure—and even this point could be dropped by
Himmler on the whim of the OKW—the motivation of the two men
was entirely different, a difference as great as the difference between
Cobbett and Joseph Chamberlain.

Indeed, it can be argued that Himmler’s plans for exploiting eastern
Europe and Russia, far from being a direct result of the agrarian
ideology of the 1920s and 1930s, was in many ways its opposite, and
went further than the political expansionism that characterised
Germany from 1890 onwards. It was imperial and not nationalist;
technocratic instead of organic; authoritarian, where Darré sought,
however unrealistically, to unwind state power.

Not all these subtleties were clear to Darré’s subordinates. Indeed,
Gauleiter Eggeling, formerly Keeper of the Seal for the German
Peasant Council, wrote to Himmler in 1940, asking him to back Darré,
because the farming population had become increasingly disaffected,
and saw in Darré’s eclipse a symbol of their own.2® Furthermore,
Himmler had developed a considerable admiration for the practical cast
of mind of the RNS experts, and preferred dealing with them to the
ministerial civil service. Darré in the meantime withdrew to his
campaigns on organic farming, and his Society of Friends of the
German Peasantry (a group he started in 1939, with a view to
protecting peasant interests from the implications of the war, and the
defeat which he foresaw),?” while intermittently attacking Himmler
and the establishment of the RKFDV.?8 Ironically enough, one of the
most important methods used by Himmler to take over much of the
Darréan mythos was the Race and Settlement Office founded by them
both in 1934, and a discussion of the gradual vivifying of this
cardboard edifice may help to explain some of the later complexities of
loyalty that arose in 1939 among Darré’s followers.

EARLY SS SETTLEMENT AND THE S$ RACE AND SETTLEMENT OFFICE
Although the basic tenet of the Race & Settlement Office lay in the SS
Marriage Order of 31st December 19312? through which permission

had to be obtained.by SS members for marriage, and the prospective
spouse racially examined by the SS Race Office, it was not until

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Himmiler’s decree of 21st September 1934 that the office was effectively
established as an independent vehicle for the ideological education of
the SS.3° It was to bring about a close connection with the peasantry,
and realise the aims of Blut und Boden.3* Although the peasant theme
ran through the office, the Settlement Division had the lowest but one
number of officials manning it: two, as opposed to the ninety SS men
working in the Sippenamt.?? This indicates the lack of importance
accorded to SS settlement; none the less, the training courses for SS
members included education in fundamental concepts of Blut und
Boden?? and the Darréan theme was emphasised in other ways. For
example, each department: had a Bauern representative; who wore the
Odal rune as an insignia.?4

Darré was head of the RuSHA until February 1938, when SS
Gruppenführer G. Pancke took over. In July 1940, Otto Hofmann, and
in April 1943, Richard Hildebrandt, succeeded to the position.35 The
racial department had been established to propound the view that all
history, ethics, law and economics are determined by blood’, and
worked largely on theoretical questions. It actually was run by Dr
Reischle, second-in-command of the RNS, and greatly admired by
Darré, whose biographer he was. In 1939 he was sacked by Himmler,
courteously enough, for being a ‘Darré man’, and replaced by a Dr
Schultz.?6 The Racial Office itself was hived off from RuSHA in 1938,
and became part of the Ahnenerbe office.??

Werner Willikens, State Secretary in the Ministry for Agriculture,
and a close friend of Herbert Backe, headed the settlement division,
which was supposed to deal with settler selection, applications and
homestead settlement; all of these were matters which in fact were
dealt with by the Ministry of Agriculture settlement department. In
1936, Backe took over from Willikens, and three new departments
were created, but no significant change in activity occurred. In March
1941 the RuSHA took on the role of welfare office for the Waffen SS,
especially those members who were of peasant origin, and later on in the
war ran convalescent homes for wounded members of the Waffen SS.?®

The fact that two prominent members of the Ministry of
Agriculture, Backe and Willikens, were successively leaders of the
settlement division of the RuSHA seems to emphasise the importance
of this office. However, it must be stressed that the real activity was
going on in the Ministry of Agriculture itself, and the positions of
Backe, Willikens and Reischle emphasised RuSHA’s weakness rather
than its strength. They were there to lend it authority and status, their
role largely confined to signing letters and bulletins.

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_ The Praetorian Guard led by a Jesuit’

The cross-membership existing between the Ministry of

Agriculture, the National Food Estate and the SS, implies an identity

of purpose which did not really exist. The upper echelons of the
agrarian lobby, such as, for instance, all Landesbauernführer, had always
been encouraged to join the SS, partly because of Darré’s original
connection with the formation of the Race & Settlement Office, and
partly because of the early friendship between Himmler and Darré.3°

During the war, the agricultural experts employed outside German
territory were normally given SS ranks. Cross-membership in the SS
continued well into the war, as indeed was inevitable, since no fully
autonomous SS units seem to have existed before that.4° There was a
certain amount of cross-membership in the SA, including Gustav
Behrens, peasant representative in the RNS. But in general such
membership was discouraged. Darré disliked the SA, considering them
to be largely urban in composition, stupid and overbearing.*4

The first SS settlement project was in 1935, the Gemeinschaft der
SS— Siedler und der Nordensee. It soon encountered difficulties, largely
because the SS-men who were building ‘the settlement were doing so
in their spare time. It was at this time that Himmler complained to
Harmening, of the RNS settlement department, that settlers were
divided into ‘pure organisers and romantics’.4? Despite this bad start,

‘Himmler wrote the following year to Darré, stressing that details were

not as important as precipitating action.4? Darré’s odd handling of
Himmler’s request was connected with his growing fear of Himmler’s
power. Aware of his own weak position, and Himmler’s interest in
taking over settlement activity, Darré had tried to engage Bormann, of
all people, to support him against Himmler as early as 1935. However,
after a certain amount of wining, dining and plotting, Bormann
disclosed Darré’s approach to Himmler,** who seems to have been
amused rather than alarmed. The result was that Darré began to evade
Himmler’s letters and verbal requests about, SS settlement from 1935
onwards.*° But during 1936, a barrage of requests came to Himmler to
make room for SS-men in settlement villages. These were passed on to
Darré.*® Clearly, although Himmler had always intended the RuSHA
to establish SS settler communities, it was not a high-priority issue, and
the principles of comradeship, mutual loyalty and support which his
orders to the SS emphasised, conflicted visibly with the principle of
economic viability.*?

The exchange of letters with Darré—still ‘Richard’ and ‘Heini’ at
this stage—suggests that Himmler’s interest in SS settlement arose more
from pressure from his staff than from some long hidden plan of his

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own. Himmler decided on a pilot scheme and the building of an SS
settlement village, the first to be formally supported by the SS Head
Office, was put in hand late in 1037. It indicates Himmler’s growing
interest that Dr Kummer demanded six-monthly reports and asked the
local SS unit to help supply emergency hay and straw.48

This was the first indication of what was to be Himmler’s way in
to the settlement programme—confidential co-operation with
Kummer, head of the Ministry of Agriculture Settlement Office. It was
at the same time, late in 1937, that the Race & Settlement Office, after
hearing from Himmler, announced to Kummer that they wanted to
see SS settlement increased, and suggested Pomerania. Himmler agreed
enthusiastically, promising that land would be made available for the

SS from the amended Osthilfe procedure, whereby indebted estates:

exchanged land in return for government subsidies. Kummer, of
course, was not supposed to syphon off settlement land and funds to
the SS; either nobody noticed what was happening, or they were too
frightened of Himmler to complain. Kummer also gave detailed
instructions to the SS section leaders on how to avoid conflict with
other settlement offices, together with the NSDAP at Ganu level.*?

Writing to Himmler, Kummer spoke even more frankly about
potential institutional conflicts, indicating the extent to which the SS
was distrusted by other groups within Germany in the 1930s. Even
Darré was alarmed at news of the ‘Fausthof’ project. The first result of
the publicity which surrounded its founding was that he indignantly
demanded details of it, including the relevant cost estimates. Kummer
kept Himmler advised of Darré’s reactions, and suggested that.

In my capacity as a member of the SS and not as a civil
servant, the Northern SS section should at once organise their
own SS activity, since close co-operation between the
settlement authorities and the SS is lacking.°

These authorities had a high proportion of pre-Nazi civil servants, and
possibly for that reason were more hostile to the SS. Certainly,
Kummer alleged that these same authorities were ‘ganging up’ against
the SS, together with Landesbauernführer from the National Food Estate,
and that both groups had Darré’s support.

Land acquisition for those SS projects encountered the same
difficulties that faced the Ministry of Agriculture. Domaine land was
seldom available for settlement, while the OKW supported the
existence of large estates on the grounds that they were the only
effective farms.

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. ‘The Praetorian Guard led-by a Jesuit’

This discussion of early SS settlement activity brings out several
points which have not emerged clearly in the literature concerning
either the SS and agriculture, or the SS’s relationship with other

institutions between 1933 and 1939: first, that SS settlement was a late

phenomenon in the Third Reich, despite the emphasis in its own
propaganda on Blut und Boden; second, that the head of settlement in
the RMEL was plotting with the head of the SS to bypass his own
ministry, and specifically the man who had propounded the notion of
settlement in the first place, Darré. It demonstrates the degree of
hostility existing between the National Food Estate and the SS, despite
some degree of interlocking membership at top administrative levels,5!

` and the extent to which the Settlement Office and peasant education

department of the RuSHA remained a sideline until 1937. Kummer
saw no difficulty in working towards what he assumed to be
Himmler’s aims, having always been a keen German expansionist,
obsessed with the need to expand and strengthen the German border in
the east. He promised Himmler land for the SS via Osthilfe, in order to
“create important racial and political support for the Fiihrer’s policies east
of the Elbe’.52 Indeed, Kummer, chief financial adviser to the
Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Inneren Kolonisation for many years, was

writing to Darré as early as 1933, that settlement in eastern and

northern Germany had to serve the national interest and ‘maintain the
armed political situation’.

This implied a complete reversion to Wilhelmine and Weimar
concepts of eastern settlement, and a final rejection for Darré’s
Bauernreich, and helps to demonstrate the continuity that lay behind
what became a key SS programme, poorly carried out and unfinished
as it was: the establishment of a Volksdeutsche barrier to possible
dangers from the east. The value to Himmler of the SS settlement
programme in Germany seems to have been a pilot project. Himmler
himself referred to the need for a ‘copybook exercise’ in settlement in
late 1938, for the RuSHA to obtain the ‘foundation and experience for
a future huge settlement proceeding’, and although he did not state
where the future proceeding would take place, it was presumably to
do with the ethnic Germans.5?

Among ordinary SS members, however, there was enthusiasm for
settlement on German territory, although most SS members were
employed in non-agricultural posts. In December 1937 all leaders of
the Death’s Head Division were asked to find out how many of their
members were suitable settler material, and how many members came
from peasant backgrounds.*4 Interestingly, the collation of these simple

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‘The Praetorian Guard led by a Jesuit’

statistics was ordered to be kept secret ‘to prevent unrest among units’;
presumably, settlements were so desirable that jealousy and competition
had to be avoided.55

Another initiative which emerged directly from local SS section
leaders showed again their interest in increasing the SS link with the
land. The Saxony Landesbauernfiihrer agreed with the local SS leader to
form SS agricultural units, which would work with the local RNS
members in helping to organise settlements.>® Darré forwarded the idea
to Himmler, who had no objections. l

Despite the apparent co-operation of the Gauleitungen in Saxony
and Swabia, who offered no opposition to the SS recruitment drive
among young people for the agricultural units, activity in this area
continued to be merely marginal and local.5” Yet, if ideological
‘correctness’ was any guide to success in the Third Reich, sach projects
should have been more effective, for the ideological reasoning behind
the formation of the SS/Reichnährstand groups was strongly emphasised
in the recruitment literature. One directive stated:

The SS is part of the NSDAP. lts members are increasingly
selected with a view to their racial value. Their racial excellence
can only be perpetuated if the SS is rooted in the peasantry.
Herein lies the deeper meaning of the concept Blut und Boden:
all young men from the countryside should be SS members.
The SS Landgruppen will be the future racial crack-troops of the
peasantry.?®

In reality, evidence suggests that the link between countryside and
SS-men was less significant than the propaganda suggests. Statistics
conflict on exactly how many SS-men came from peasant stock, but
among the long-serving SS-men who had received farms by 1941
many had done badly through lack of experience.5? The fact that their
wives were usually from an urban background was an added
drawback. This lack of success was despite a compulsory two-year
training course.©°

When the right candidate was available,°! then (despite grand
claims that shortage of money must not be allowed to deter
applicants), money for SS settlement was a major issue, as it was for

the RMEL settlement department. In August 1938, Pancke, who was.

now head of the RuSHA in Darré’s place, warned Himmler that the
RuSHA’s choice of suitable settlers was being curtailed by ‘a shortage
of money among settlers’. Pancke conferred with Walter Granzow, an

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‘The Praetorian Guard led by a Jesuit’

ex-RNS official who had been promoted to be’ head of the Deutsche

Siedlungsbank after a failed attempt to oust Darré,°? and Granzow
agreed to provide bank funds of three to eight million Reichsmark.°?
He refused requests for more on the grounds that some ten thousand `
settlements had been in financial difficulties in the last year alone, and
had received six million Reichsmark. _

After the creation of a Protectorate in 1938, the RuSHA looked to
the Sudetenland to provide a supply of cheap, if not free land for
settlement. It tooks the fight for SS settlements into a new area and
brought new room for manoeuvre, plotting and power-seeking, all
areas in which the SS agrarian ideologues proved adept.

THE LAND OFFICE IN PRAGUE: SS INSTRUMENT FOR EXPROPRIATION

SS settlement activity found its suitable vehicle in the shape of the
Deutsche Ansiedlungsgesellschaft (DAG), or German Resettlement
Society, the largest of the settlement societies re-organised by Darré
between 1933 and 1936. In 1939, the company was still in private
hands, and when its manager suggested to Darré that the shares should
be nationalised, Darré agreed, seeing the proposal as a move away from
‘capitalist concepts’. He ordered the shares to be sold to the Dresdner
Bank as a beginning. He was unaware that von Gottberg, an official in
the RuSHA, had secretly told Riecke, Backe’s second-in-command in
the Ministry of Agriculture after Backe replaced Darré in 1942, that he
was interested in purchasing the shares on behalf of thë SS.64 When
the purchase was completed, the Dresdner Bank told Darré that the two
government officials who had bought the shares were Gottberg’s
nominees. Gottberg now controlled the DAG. Darré protested to
Himmler that he had disbanded the earlier settlement societies because
of their ‘strongly capitalist orientation’, and that, if a single SS unit
controlled the company, the interest of Germany and of the settlers
would be unprotected. On Himmler’s order, von Gottberg submitted a
reply which, interlarded with the standard jargon about the need for a

- healthy peasantry and vélkisch economic policies, invoked Wehrmacht

support and contained the delicate threat. ‘Nobody is likely to take
responsibility for destroying such vital measures’.°5 In other words, the
whole exercise was in order to establish SS farmers in Germany where
uprooted by the Wehrmacht, and sidetracking the hostility that would
otherwise be encountered. The share purchase is dated at some fifteen
months before the date on which the DAG was alleged at che

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‘The Praetorian Guard led by a Jesuit’

Nuremberg trials to have been acquired for the purposes of
expropriating land in the East.6% In spite of Himmler’s dislike, the
management of the DAG was left strictly alone, and proved the ideal
instrument for organising large-scale settlement of ethnic German
peasants in Lorraine, Danzig-West Prussia, the Tyrol and the Danubian
area, and by 1940 was being used for this purpose by the SS.6?

In 1937, the SS had formed a non-profit-making corporation to
buy up church land in west Germany standing empty as a result of the
closure of the Catholic Orders by the state. The society, the Deutsche
Reichsverein für Siedlungspflege, or DRV, was registered in Berlin, where
it bought shares in the DAG with the help of the Prague Land Office.
Hildebrandt, Pancke and von Gottberg were on the Board of
Management, while Theo Gross, first head of the Prague Land Office,
was liaison officer with the NSDAP. Although registered as an
ordinary share company, its articles stated that it was not an ‘economic
commercial enterprise’, but looked after the welfare of all German
settlers, coordinating the available facilities of various German counties
‘according to the National Socialist Weltanschauung’. This in effect
meant a potent anti-church bias, that came into full force in south and
west Germany, as well as in Austria, and the Protectorate with its
strong Catholic church. As their 1940 report pointed out, “The
ideological fight against the political power of the church takes a new
turn with this instrument’ (the DRV), which claimed to be merely
returning to the German people property expropriated over hundreds
of years by the church.®® This legalised take-over was carried out in
association with the Prague Land Office. What had begun as a means
of getting over the shortage of money and resources for German based
settlement had become a large-scale instrument of resettlement and
expropriation, carried out with a complementary paraphernalia of
welfare organisations and social workers. It was perhaps a case where
ideological and financial requirements were happily married.

After the Anschluss, the new govemor of Austria, Seyss-Inquart,
suggested to Darré in May 1939 that a special office, staffed by the
RNS, be set up to deal with the special problems of the Austrian
mountain peasants.°? These peasants’ poverty had shocked visiting
German agriculturalists in the mid-1930s.7° Now Seyss-Inquart wanted
immediate aid for them while the dissolution of the Austrian Ministry
of Agriculture meant that administration now devolved upon the
German ministry. The southern peasants conformed to the National

Socialist agrarian ideal, being self-sufficient, producing little marketable’

surplus and ‘of great racial value’. Darré agreed to co-operate in setting

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.‘ The Praetorian Guard led by a Jesuit’

up a separate office in the area, adding that he would be particularly
glad to introduce into his ministry someone who would ‘redress its
somewhat strong north German emphasis’ {a ‘reference to the effect of
the incorporation of the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture in 1935).7!
When Darré put the idea before Lammers. it was refused, as was
usual with Darr&’s proposals.”? However, Heydrich heard of it, and
forwarded a suggestion to Himmler that a Land Office be established
to manage land both in Austria and in the Sudetenland, to be based in
Prague. The Land Office was duly established in July 1939, on the face
of it a joint effort between RNS officials and local representatives of
the German minority.”? Its function was to oversee the evacuation of

“Czechs from German and Germans from Czech areas of the annexed

portions of Czechoslovakia.”4

Unknown to Darré, the plan for the SS to control the Sudetenland
via a Land Office had been proposed by Pancke to Himmler in
October 1938, in a letter discussing the possible expansion of German
settlement there.”5 After Henlein’s nomination as Reichskommissar for
the Sudetenland, Pancke decided to ignore Himmler’s previous order
that there was to be no contact between the ethnic Germans there and
German officials, and held a meeting with Henlein and Karl Franck on
‘how to rectify the results of the Czech land reform’ (a reference to the
anti-German legislation embodied in the Czech Land Reform of the
thirties), and establish new German settlements in the ‘Sudetengau’.
Henlein responded at a later meeting that the Sudeten German peasants
wanted to have nothing to do with the SS—exactly why was not
stated—and Pancke reported to Himmler that the best way to insert SS
influence was to set up a Land Office, with Henlein as leader, and
RuSHA men providing the personnel, to ‘maintain SS influence’.

If, through the work of the SS and RuS members in the
Sudeten area we can achieve an example of correct and healthy
settlement, then the moment will be brought nearer when the
SS, under the spur of true achievement, will be able to take
over the Settlement Office in the old Reich as well ... the
work of the Settlement Office [of the RuSHA] will remain
trivial unless the whole area is decisively altered, an opportunity
which now offers itself in the Sudetenland—either that or spend
millions,76

—presumably a reference to the possibilities of seizure without
compensation of evacuated land, or land under the control of the
Gestapo.

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‘The Praetorian Guard led by a Jesuit’

Parcels of land were seized from Czechs in the Sudetenland by the
Gestapo, the only area in ‘Greater Germany’ where this procedure
seems to have been followed (although the RNS LBF for the Saarland
reported mass evacuations from land holdings). Acquisitions in the
Sudetenland averaged 520 Reichsmark per hectare, whereas
compensation prices in Thuringia, for example, were 2,600 RM per
hectare.

A puzzled reference by Lammers to Pancke’s draft suggestion for
the Prague Land Office survives. In the same month that Pancke wrote
to Himmler, October 1938, Lammers noted that a member of
Henlein’s staff in the Sudetenland had negotiated a draft Führer-decree
with someone in the Chancellery on the regulation of land use in the
Sudetenland, proposing the erection of a Land and Settlement Office
which would be completely independent of the central authorities,
with the exception of the Four Year Plan authorities. Lammers
minuted that the Minister of the Interior thought the proposals
‘impossible’, while none of the departments concerned could be found
to admit knowledge of the matter.’”

Himmler appeared to favour any plan put on him for extending SS
authority—as long as it could be done without too much friction. The
establishment of the Prague Land Office in 1938 was important. It was
the first example of SS institutional imperialism at work outside the
Altreich borders. Darré, the RMEL and the RNS were all successfully
bypassed, and the Ministry of the Interior’s objections ignored. The
success of a small and hitherto unimportant SS office in gaining control
in the occupied territory was a step towards collecting all the racial
offices under Himmler’s control, a fait accompli by the end of 1939.78 It
gave scope for the first massive transfers of land, property and people.

Darré, meanwhile, had attempted to resign from the SS—a brave
move blocked by Hitler on appeal by Himmler??—and with his gift for
acquiring the hostility of influential opponents by inept political man-
oeuvring, had begun a campaign against von Gottberg, the official behind
the SS takeover of the DAG. Complaining as he would later of ‘SS Cheka
methods used in the Sudetenland against Germans’,®° Darré wrote

SS Führer von Gottberg, [now] leader of the SS Land Office in
Prague. A drunken sot involved with gangsters. The evacuation
policy in the Czech area, yes, but slowly. Gottberg, quicker but
worse. On this, it must be said that my ordinary administrative -
facilities could not have coped with this ‘de-Czeching’ of
Bohemia and Moravia, because to do this ‘legally’ would have

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‘The Praetorian Guard led by a Jesuit’

required extensive preparations over a long ‘period of time, at
least, as long as the German Boverment valued appearances
before the outside world.®!

—a startling comment from someone who was still a minister of the
government, and one which revealed again his alienation from what
was happening.

In an attempt to further his campaign against von Gottberg, and at
the same time rescue his own concept of peasant settlement, Darré
contacted Gustav Pancke in May 1939 (at that date Pancke was still
head of the RuSHA) to try to win him over. Darré’s diary records only
the discussion over the planned Wehrbauern villages on Germany’s
eastern border, but Pancke’s notes, drawn up immediately after the
meeting in Darré’s house, show the attempted negotiation in detail.82

Darré first told Pancke that von Gottberg was trying to establish a
Land Office in Prague over his head, and suggested that Kummer
should replace Gottberg. Unfortunately for Darré, Kummer was now in
disgrace with the RuSHA. He had criticised the DAG to a
Landesbauernfuihrer®? and Pancke commented ironically that co-operation
with Kummer would be difficult, since he attacked all Race and
Settlement projects. Darré then turned to Himmiler’s Wehrbauern

‘concept, which entailed a fortified village of some thirty families,

governed by two or three SS men who would also be trained soldiers.
Darré attacked this idea of combining farming and fighting, and again
propounded his own belief in a peasantry closely rooted to their own
land, drawing a parallel, once again, to the colonisation ‘of the West in
America.

Pancke did express agreement on the basic idea of strengthening
peasant representation: ‘I hope that one day every Minister and State
Secretary will be a farrner’s son’, but he differed substantially on the
rationale for settling ‘relatively uncivilised areas in the East’. It was not
to possess the land in some rooted, mystical way, but to form
economic ties with the Altreich which would bind the two areas
together irrevocably, as far as marketing, production and industry were
concerned. He also doubted whether a pool of suitable peasant families
existed for what Darré had in mind. Did such ‘adventurous and
romantic families really exist’? Darré’s proposal for future co-operation
became vague at this point, and Pancke retired in bewilderment,
suspicious about Darré’s intentions. Thus, Darré’s attempt to win over
Himmlers man on issues, both organisational and political, where
there was considerable disagreement, had the opposite effect.

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‘The Praetorian Guard led by a Jesuit’

The shift of emphasis from establishing a large-scale SS settlement
programme within Germany—the aim as expressed in Pancke’s letters
to Himmler in 1938—to creating what was eventually an SS ruled
empire in Poland and Russia, was clearly foreshadowed in this
conversation.

The invasion changed the focus of attention for many of the
agrarian ideologues, as the example of Konrad Meyer was to show.
Shortly after the creation of the RKFDV, Himmler summoned Meyer
to Warsaw, and asked him to take over and expand the RKFDV
planning office. Meyer, who had occupied academic posts before the
war as an expert in land planning and utilisation, accepted.®* He
commented after the war that relations between his office and Darré

remained tense until Darré’s dismissal as minister in 1942, whereas.

‘relations between the RKFDV and the Ministry of Agriculture
remained undisturbed ... through the sensible behaviour of State
Secretary Backe’. Darré’s public response to the news of the formation
of the Reich Commisariat was to call a conference of representatives
from the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Food Estate and the
Settlement Societies to discuss their mutual expertise in agricultural
settlement. He wrote in his diary: ‘Harmening tells me that all
settlement in Poland shall be carried out by the SS ... This is the most
decisive defeat of my life.’®5

Although much of the ensuing correspondence between Darré and
Himmler, and Darré and Lammers, stressed questions of ministerial
competence, and although the trial judge at Nuremberg considered
that the disagreement between Darré and Himmler was over power
rather than ideas, it is clear from Darré’s campaign that issues of vital
ideological importance for him were at stake.2© He wrote to Lammers,
for example, enclosing a book on Anglo-Irish history, saying that if
the Polish resettlement was not carried out ‘from the point of view of
creating a sound land law’, it would end with the same kind of strife
that had characterised England’s relations with southern Ireland, the
north, according to Darré, having been stabilised through a yeoman-
farmer pattern of development, while the south had been patterned on
English neo-feudal land holdings, large estates and rented holdings.®7
This was a development of Darré’s belief that independent farmers were
more likely to identify with the nation, and less likely to behave as

hostile nationals. The letter does leave unclear the extent to which

Darré was prepared to dispossess the Polish farmers in the incorporated
areas, beyond, that is, the question of exchange of populations,
generally envisaged by Germans at that time. It is possible that he was

146

‘The Praetorian Guard led by a Jesuit’

thinking of a mixed German-Polish occupation, both farming
according to the Erbhof ideal. Certainly Darré had never been as anti-
Polish as many of his colleagues, as his dispositions for allowing Polish
farmers to become erbhoffahig under the EHG make clear. However,
what was more important to Darré than humane considerations about
the existing Polish settlers was the need to avoid a colonial situation,
the nightmare that had bedevilled England’s relations with Ireland. He
was also looking for a looser socio-political structure than was
generally envisaged, one the Jeffersonian connotations of which are
indicated in his comparison with the American colonisation of the
West: the farming population was to be bound more to the soil than
to national or economic entities. In contrast, the emphasis on
technocracy, development and efficiency that developed in the SS-state
(which is not to argue that the SS-state was efficient in practice),
included the notion of a link with the soil because it fitted practical
data, the given belief that social man needed such a link, and that a
society ordered on such a basis would be more efficient.

The controversy over whether settlement was intended to take
place within an enlarged German border®® or whether it would consist
of an armed incursion into lands east of Poland, obviously carried
implications which went to the heart of Nazi ideology.

By 1938 Darré observed the growing power of Himmler and the
SS with alarm—‘Heini now has the soul of the SS firmly in his hand’,
He was one of the first observers of SS power to comment on the
growth of their economic power; he claimed in early 1939 that Himmler
was deliberately infiltrating his men into positions whére they could
‘hold the purse strings’.®9

The sub-stratum of policy disagreement was not a negligible
element in Darré’s attempt to protect his sphere of power, since he was
convinced that a settlement programme carried out by the RNS—
using the Erbhof legislation, and reshaping. dwarf farms into viable
units—would be different from and superior to SS-ruled expansion,
with their emphasis on economic activity and, Darré believed, their
hostility to the peasants.°° When a draft Ostmarkgesetz appeared in
April 1939, Darré was astonished to find that it would have taken all
power, effectively, from the RNS, and he immediately complained to
Lammers. Even Lammers saw to it that the draft was withdrawn. At
issue was Himmler’s attempt to convince Hitler that resettlement was a
political matter rather than an agricultural one. To this end, the SS
controlled the Vo-Mi-Stelle, and had achieved close links with several
ethnic German communities abroad, particularly in Eastern Europe.?}

147

“The Praetorian Guard led by a Jesuit’

Himmler’s own plans for eastern settlement, surprisingly similar to the
Weimar Internal Colonisation movement, concerned the dangers of
Polish migration into border areas, and emphasised the notion of a
border defended by militant peasants of pure German blood.
Naturally, Darré also wanted the German borderlands to be as densely
populated as possible with German peasants, but this was secondary to
his main vision, and he could not be described as ‘imperialist’ in his
aims. For example, he commented in March 1939, ‘Protectorate
declared: now possible to have a colony within our borders. Only
bearable if the Volk feel a Blutgedanken. God knows what will
happen’.°? The whole dimension of the ‘national interest’ seemed to
escape him, while Himmler’s interest lay on the militant and
expansionist role of the SS in the east.

Germany, unlike Poland and to a lesser extent Hungary (which

both had Wehrbauern policies), was a highly industrialised and
technologically advanced country which was currently planning an
aggressive war; that Himmler should have been thinking in terms of
Cossacks, Poles and feudalistic Hungarians, to promote a plan which
implied a defensive military position and a reasonably stable border
area (else why settle it?) demonstrates a curious unrealism. Certainly,
Wehrbauern settlement was a very limited exercise, when it finally took
place.°3 The failure of Himmler’s plans fully justified Darré’s criticisms
of them to Gustav Pancke in May 1939, when Pancke, the new head
of RuSHA, held talks with Kummer and Darré concerning the
proposed Wehrbauern. After watching the peacetime settlement
programme founder in Germany through a shortage of land and
money, Darré was now presented with the full might of SS power
being thrown behind a programme which he considered contrary to
the ideals of Blut und Boden, and quite unrealisable anyway. He did not
fight his campaign well. Prepared to develop the implications inherent
in his own views—writing in June 1939 that the ‘state and its spirit
must be wound down, Megalopolis will decline’®*—Darré entered into
a condition of incoherent rage that his slogans should be used by men
who intended something quite different.

On hearing that the task of resettling the ethnic Germans had been
given to the newly established RKFDV°5 in October 1939, Darré wrote
a long letter to Lammers claiming that the RNS alone had the special

knowledge needed to resettle those ethnic Germans who had been .

expropriated by Polish land reforms. He insisted, with his usual
tactlessness, that SS-men were the wrong choice to carry out the job,
because they were particularly unpopular with the peasants, and any

148

‘The Praetorian Guard led by a Jesuit’

such connection would arouse resentment. There seems to have been

little evidence for this claim, but Darré’s next point was more valid:
that the SS would not know how to create viable holdings from the

‘dwarf holdings’ common in the Warthegau. Darré’s criticism of the >

Wehrbauern concept was then made openly for the first time. If the
word meant simply a yeoman peasantry, able to defend themselves
against bands of marauding Polish migrants, then the ordinary Bauern
was perfectly suitable for the task. If a ‘Cossack type of border
protection’ was at issue, then Darré demanded a clarification of what
precisely Himmler thought he was playing at, since such settlement
implied the existence of garrisons, and the superiority of such a
military force over the farmer. In that case, the normal border
garrisons and motorised troops would be more effective than the
Wehrbauern, who were neither fish nor fowl,°® too ill prepared for a
modern war, and too involved in military relationships to develop into
a stable peasantry.

Unfortunately for Darré, this sensible analysis appeared too late in
the course of a long letter to repair the impression of a man merely
fighting for his bailiwick. Darré’s next step was to send a ten-page
memo to Himmler about the background of the Baltic Germans from
Estonia and Latvia who were expected ‘any minute’.°? Darré set out
their history and told Himmler that he had laid a comprehensive plan
for their resettlement before Stresemann in the 1920s. Himmler replied
more than two weeks later, with a dig at Darré’s expert knowledge: he
alleged that the supposedly hundred per cent bauernfahig settlers from
the Baltic in fact were mostly from the Baltic towns, while the
remainder had acquired enormous latifundia through the old Hanse
League (sic), and Himmler really did not feel able to reproduce the
same conditions in the German area.?®

Himmler was clearly not prepared to compromise with Darré, and
it was only through Backe’s intervention that some marketing
corporation personnel were eventually ‘borrowed’ by the RKFDV and
the Vo-Mi-Stelle for the task of organising ethnic German settlement,
but by now under the effective authority of Backe and the Ministry of
Agriculture rather than Darre.

Fundamental responsibility for the resettlement of the ethnic
Germans lay with Himmler and the RKFDV, specifically with SS
Brigade-leader Ulrich Greifelt, head of the RKFDV till 1942.
Throughout the war, there had to be contacts with the Ministry of
Agriculture over questions of ensuring harvesting, and transporting
produce, so that while unconnected with resettlement, the Ministry of

149

‘The Praetorian Guard led by a Jesuit’

Agriculture was involved in the administration of food production in
the occupied areas. Regional farming advisers, known as
Kreislandwirten were installed, who were responsible for ensuring food
supplies locally, but had nothing to do with the question of land
ownership.?? Within the framework of the Four Year Plan, the
Haupttreuhandstelle Ost was administered by Winckler (who had
undertaken trustee work during the Weimar period). Darré’s
replacement by Backe in 1942 meant that a new phase of co-operation
between the RKFDV and the Agricultural Ministry began. Backe
made an effort to retain Himmler’s favour, while endeavouring to
maintain the level of food production in the incorporated areas; he
may also have supplied an element of factual information for Himmler,

who lacked a technical background in agriculture. Backe’s promotion:

obviously simplified matters for Himmler, who no longer had to cope
with Darré’s tendency to play at machiavellian politics, while at the
same time trying to salvage his own aims.

150

CHAPTER SEVEN

Poland: Germany’s Ireland?

GRANARY OR PEASANT’S PARADISE?

In November 1939, Willikens, State Secretary in the Ministry of
Agriculture, wrote to Himmler as Reichskommissar, suggesting that the
function of the new Reichsgaue (the Wartheland) was to be for purely
German peasant producers.

No titles to the new land should be handed out, because after
the war, priority must be to Volksdeutsche peasants and soldiers
who fought for it. This is morally right, also the way to produce
as much as possible from the land.‘

Nothing could more clearly encapsulate the joint role the
Volksdeutsche peasants were to play than this request. But a different
plan was to use the conquered acres of the east.to establish large estates
on the Prussian pattern, to produce grain and potatoes with hired
Polish labourers. This was favoured by Goering and the German High
Command, while Himmler, despite his penchant for the Wehrbauern
concept, favoured in practice the demands of the landed aristocracy.

The imminent arrival of hundreds of thousands of returning
Germans turned the balance in favour of an attempt at a peasant-type
settlement, at least as concerned the Volksdeutsche. Such an operation,
however, necessitated the large-scale deportations which were
associated with the re-settlement programme in the incorporated areas,
and which have drawn attention away from other aspects of these
events.

The existence of two quite separate plans for the area—the raw
material-pool-cum-corn-chamber, and the Germanised peasant nation—
was complicated by the improvised nature of everything that took
place between 1939 and 1945. As plan succeeded plan, order succeeded
order, and reorganisation succeeded reorganisation, great care has to be
taken to distinguish what was actually happening in the incorporated
areas from what the most recent pronouncement had demanded was to

151

Poland: "'Germany’s Ireland’.

happen. For example, one might well wonder how it was that the
‘Z Aktion of 1942 which expelled Polish dwarf farm smallholders from
their holdings in the Warthegau, could find any Polish farmers in the
area at all, considering that at least three orders had already emerged
from various offices to deport them to the General-Gouvernement.? A
year later, hundreds of thousands of Polish farm Jabourers were
deported to Germany as conscripted farm labourers, workers who
would not have been available for that purpose if previous deportation
plans had been implemented.?

Even the exact whereabouts of the border between Restpolen and
the new German county was a last-minute arrangement. One RuSHA
adviser wrote scathingly to Himmler in October 1939 that the plan to
incorporate Kracow, ‘the very centre of Polish culture’ into a newly

created ‘German’ area was madness, and would only damage
Germany’s reputation.*

The administration of western Galicia is overburdened with
such problems and in chaos, while continuing uncertainty over

the future nationality of this or that administrative area increases
the existing chaos.°

The Police Chief at Bromberg, SS GF Hildebrandt, commented in
November 1939 that room had to be found in his area for another
10,000 Wolhynien Germans, who were ‘in the first place to be
considered as successors to the Poniatowski villages’,o—meaning
presumably that the unfortunate Wolhyniens would be used as armed
settlers to fight their Polish neighbours in the countryside. The
argument in favour of using the Volksdeutsche as Wehrbauern tended to
be produced, understandably perhaps, by SS Police Chiefs and by
Himmler, while the argument in favour of peasant food production
came from members of the National Food Estate drafted as agricultural
advisers after the outbreak of war.” Members of the RuSHA advisory
staff were strongest in their advocacy of deporting (or Gérmanising)
the Polish population, and replacing them with Germans, for both
racial and food production reasons. One suggestion that seems not to
have been made was to try to increase food production using existing
Polish agricultural organisational methods. Not only had numerous
studies of Polish food production between the wars revealed the fact
that production had dropped by between twenty and forty per cent.in
formerly Prussian areas, but a special study commissioned by the
National Statistics Office in July 1939 described Warsaw, Lodz, Silesia,

152

This tablet commemer
was first place

| i : imperial city’,
ating Darre, Blood and Soil, and Goslar ‘the old imp y

d in one of Goslar’s church:

es in 1934. (Goslar Archive.)

'eynsers e uo pssodwnndns ‘398157 POog [euonen ayı jo JoquuAs Jesysiesyjaa
aq: uq pugag epon ut Zuna et Ss31ppe 0 SITeM (JJO] UIOLF puo9sas) axe]

HEGI "AND questag [PUOTIEKT 5 AUBTHIAD) S9UI0IIQ AL{SOL)

Above: This picture of Darré’s birthplace in Belgrano, Argentina (1896),
was sent to him in 1936 by aN.S.D.A.P. youth group in Argentina.
(Goslar Archive.)

Below: Darré here gives an after-lunch pep talk to the leaders of the
National Food Estate, at a farm belonging to one of them. 1934/5.
(Mrs. N. Backe.)

Nimburg postcard. 1935.

Top: Darré was shown the medieval ex-monastery behind the Imperial Palace at
Goslar. Here he points it out to his wife. Darré was vehemently anti-Christian.
(Mrs. N. Backe.)

Left: Commemoration stone at Goslar.

Right: Hitler addressed the Harvest Festival Rally at the Buekeberg. 1935.
(Mrs. N. Backe.)

Troops parade through Goslar, the new peasant city. 1934. (Goslar Archive.)

Peasant labour used to build their own new houses, to cut costs in new settlements.

Poland: ‘Germany’s Ireland’

Galicia and Kielce as ‘agricultural deficit areas’.,Germany had double
the number of cattle, and four times the number of pigs and goats per
capita,? twenty-five per cent more arable land and twenty-five per cent
less forest.

More than one-third of the agricultural land belongs to farms
of less than 2 ha, some one-fifth up to 5 ha. No surplus worth
mentioning could be brought to market—even with sensible
management—given these farm sizes. A large part of the
remaining ground is forest. An example of what is produced by
the larger farmis: one 200 ha farm we took over, which on the
whole had not suffered from the war, presumably thus not lost
any poultry. Some 28 ha of fish pools delivered 8-10 cwt, of
fish a year! The rye was enough for the agricultural labourers,
and the manager grew his own food. You can see from this
example what large and medium farms are going to produce
for urban consumers. 10

Another report to Himmler commented that Polish land was
‘uneven, lacking in natural resources, exhausted and extremely wet,
with no natural drainage’.!! Thus, a mixture of contempt for Polish

‘farmers for having fallen behind Prussian standards, and the fact that

areas like Galicia were in any case among the poorest peasant farming
areas in Europe,!? led inexorably to the decision to deport Polish
farmers and substitute ‘good German peasants’ in their place. A vivid
impression of the poverty of the Polish countryside is given in the
diary of a Nazi administrator in the incorporated areas in 1941:13
‘Everything is primitive, poverty stricken and filthy. With the German
settlers from Russia, things are much cleaner, but otherwise little
different ... I was told that people actually lived in holes in the ground
round here. I saw poverty stricken villages ... unplastered houses, reed
thatched roofs, reed and clay walls ... farmhouses without solid floors
or even plaster.’

In fact, the exent to which Poland was virtually an agriculturally
undeveloped land was well recognised by local officials. However, the
implications of this fact, the resources and effort that would be needed
in order to make Poland and the incorporated areas net contributors to
Germany’s food requirements, were consistently ignored by
administrators in Berlin, where eyes were fixed on the Polish rye
exports in the last two decades. One report which showed the
unfavourable conditions in Polish agriculture compared to Germany

153

Poland: ‘Germany’s Ireland’

pondered on where the ‘agricultural surplus area’ was. in Poland,
concluding hopefully that it was in the west. But, ‘the area
[Warthegau] is in its current structure and density of population a
deficit area, and in no way a corn chamber, the assumption which is
heard all over the place in Berlin’.1*

This report contained an early detailed plan to carry out the
population transfer which was at once to turn the Incorporated Areas
into an agricultural surplus area, and settle it with German peasants. He
recommended evacuating double the number of Poles and Jews for the
number of planned German immigrants; all Jews, and the Polish
intelligentsia would be immediately deported, while the ‘indigenous
population’ would be investigated for possible Germanisation. This
meant that a large number of Polish citizens were envisaged. as
remaining in the area. Meyer, appointed Himmler’s chief planning
officer in late 1939, called for a population balance of fifty per cent
Germans, and fifty per cent Poles, with a land holding of sixty to forty
per cent.?° Himmler, however, addressing SS leaders in Danzig in
October 1939, prophesied that in fifty years’ time, some twenty
million German settlers would be living in Posen-West Prussia—
although he wanted settlements to be kept at least 10km from the
Polish border.

The land would be free; cheap labour would be available from
Polish workers. Forests would provide wood. All that had to be paid
for was electricity, piped water, sinks and baths. Like most of
Himmler’s proposals for Wehrbauern settlement, this bears out Backe’s
comment that Himmler’s settlement ideas were ‘vague, theoretical and
not based on practicalities’.17

The vaguer Himmler’s promises, the more detailed were the
recommendations of the RuSHA officials. Gustav Pancke
recommended that peasant settlement be confined to western Galicia
and the southern part of Upper Silesia, so that Polish industrial areas
should be spared any evacuation measures. He requested the Höhere SS
und Polizei Führer to direct all settlers to the south.!® Hildebrandt also
wanted to avoid disturbance to the Polish economy, and suggested
drawing up lists of firms which were essential to the Polish economy,
‘co avoid arbitrary disturbance’.19

As the months dragged on and homes had to be found for
hundreds of thousands of Volksdeutsche refugees, the arguments over
the best way to use the new ‘colony’ continued. One member of the
SS planning department for land in the east visited Gauleiter Greiser in
February 1941 with detailed maps of planned re-settlement in the

154

Poland: ‘Germany's Ireland’

Warthegau. He argued that even if every centimetre of Polish land
were to be farmed by Germans, the population would still be only one
quarter German, because ‘the removal of the Polish agricultural and
urban proletariat will be a much more difficult task than that of
peasant settlement’,2° and that unless the existing agricultural structure
was changed, the existence of Polish farm labourers made ‘a true
Germanising’ impossible. Gauleiter Greiser objected that ‘the task of
the Warthegau is to produce grain, grain and still more grain--a grain
factory, and that is why it has been incorporated into the Reich’, to
which the RuSHA adviser replied with arguments so characteristic of
the peasant producer-advocate that it is worth quoting in detail.

I answered that fats and milk were needed more and peasant
farms were more productive in these areas. While this was
certainly no time to start experimenting, there was undoubted
evidence that peasants produced more than large landowners
from the same land, especially with the aid of machinery. Only
the peasant could make the Warthegau a German county—he
alone rendered the Polish labourers redundant.??

However, Greiser reiterated that Goering had expressly ordered grain

` production to be the main crop, using large farms and Polish labour.

The aim of ‘Germanisation’ was excellent in itself, but would take
thirty or forty years. With the inhumanity typical of the reformer
mentality, the RSS adviser made the counter-proposal that Polish
labourers’ families should all be deported to the General Government
in order to induce their menfolk to follow them. Finally, Greiser’s
‘reactionary adviser’, Siegmund informed the Race and Settlement
office that Goering had ordered that Poland’s agricultural structure
should remain unchanged, with the single exception of dwarf farm
consolidation. Only the large estates could produce com, or breed
herds of pedigree cattle. An agricultural leading class was needed, and
furthermore, the demands of wealthy men who wanted farms needed
satisfying —something stressed by the Wehrmacht. ‘It is mere fantasy to
talk of 5,000 new farms by 1941. You yourself know how all these
great plans of the RF [Himmler] end up’.??

This interchange of opinions tells us several significant things about
the development of settlement plans in the incorporated areas. First,
that even before the invasion of Russia, which put a stop to ambitious
re-settlement projects, very little had been done in the way of
Germanising the Wartheland as originally planned. Second, that

155

Poland: ‘Germany’s Ireland’

Goering’s orders as head of the Four Year Plan, and minister in charge
of the economy in the eastern territories, were to leave the existing
Polish agricultural structure in place. Third, that Himmler’s impressive
sounding decrees and plans were widely regarded as being romantic
fantasies, and should perhaps not be taken too seriously by historians
today.

For example, in December 1940, one of Himmler’s Anordnungen
stated that

to create opportunities for settlement, it is necessary in the
Incorporated Areas to give peasant settlers a greater share than
before of farms seized from Polish and Jewish hands—40 per
cent instead of 25 per cent of the agriculturally usable .
acreage.??

whereas, the analysis of the implementation of these plans shows that
Germanised land in the Warthegau comprised barely ten per cent of
the agriculturally usable land by May 1941.24

Again and again, the need to ensure that the ‘recaptured’ province
would become and remain German was stressed in writings of 1940-1.

The character of this land is not determined by the formal
property ownership of large estates and domains, as long as the
necessary peasants and agricultural labourers are of Polish blood;
a realisation achieved by Wilhelmine Germany far too late.?5

wrote one agricultural expert, and ‘Only the Neubildung deutschen’

Bauerntums’ could ‘neutralise the danger of having to use Polish
elements’?® as agricultural labourers.

One writer urged that all racial undesirables should be sorted out
and put into labour battalions, but were on no account to be sent east,
because Himmler planned a ‘blonde province’ there,?7 a remark that
was also quoted by Pancke in a letter to Himmler.?*

Between 1939 and 1940, therefore, the very period when the
Volksdeutsche were due to be resettled, the exercise was still in the
planning stage. Broadly speaking, the Race and Settlement’s
propaganda had a sharper racial content than that of writers like
Kummer, Schöpke, Haushofer, and others who approached the
resettlement from the small-peasant tradition of German Agrarpolitik. In
1940, the new head of the RuSHA, Hofmann, sent Himmler a copy of
Das Bevélkerungspolitische ABC, which discussed the movement of

156

Poland: ‘Germany’s Ireland’

populations in terms of the right to survive of the superior group,??
whereas Kummer, in a series of speeches made in 1940, talked more of
the value of German settlers to the nation’s security, and quoted the
old German folk-song that had become the theme song of the
Artamanen—‘Over the green, green heath, there is a better land’—as
signifying the continuity of the Volksdeutsche re-settlement with the
(alleged) peasant colonisation of East Prussia.>°

Schdpke stressed the high fertility of the German colonies in Russia,
with their population increase of ten to twenty times in a hundred
years. He saw the ethnic Germans as a vigorous source of renewal for
the agricultural population, whose presence would enable foreign

- agricultural workers to be repatriated after the war.??

Many of the writers who had propounded the virtures of peasant
production supported ‘Germanisation’ of the Wartheland for the same
reasons. Dr Otto Auhagen, whose dissertation in 1896 had compared
the productivity of small and large estates, reported enthusiastically in
1940 on the possibilities of exchanging populations on Germany’s
eastern border. He referred to similar plans drawn up during the First
World War.32 Members of the Economic Geography Institute in
Königsberg also drafted proposals for settling the ‘New German Area’
in September 1940, arguing that complete Germanisation could only

‘take place through peasant holdings of fifteen to twenty-five

hectares.?? ;

Some saw the specifically productive aspects of the venture as a
challenge. One writer described the flat, largely uncultivated plains of
the Warthegau, exposed to cold drying winds, and lacking in hedges
and shelter belts. The winters were long and cold, while roads,
electricity, drainage and schools were largely lacking. But `

With the new land in the East, it will be easier to create new
forms than in the Altreich ... a new beginning ... we do not
have to struggle with established habits, as in the old villages of
the West.?*

Seldom can the modernisation drive that ran in tandem with the
support for small farms have been so clearly expressed; significantly,
this article appeared in Neues Bauerntum. However, the implications of
what was involved in creating a viable, modemised agriculture in a
conquered land seem not to have been considered to any extent;
because of the emphasis traditionally and incorrectly placed on the
shortage of land within Germany, the availability of ‘free’ land in

157

Poland: ‘Germany’s Ireland’

Poland was seen as a cure-all for all the shortages of resources that had
beset German agriculture.

The next section of this chapter will show the extent to which the
plans failed, although in terms of agricultural productivity, considerable
improvements appeared under the leadership of RNS advisers. What is
surprising in these early enthusiastic plans is to find Darréan ideas about
the need for a Germanised medium-sized farm structure surviving in
such a strong form at middle and lower levels of the SS, as if a form
of counter-penetration had taken place. Himmler, with his plans to
develop an industrial raw material empire in che east, had taken over
re-settlement, and Darré had returned to obscurity. Yet many of Darré’s
supporters continued to work for the eventual triumph of their own
agrarian aims in the incorporated areas, convinced that they had the
support of one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich, secure
in their dominant aims: to modernise agriculture by reforming its
structure, and to reform the agricultural class system. Whatever Hitler’s
motives for the Volksdeutsche settlement, SS planning documents leave
no doubt about what they thought was their function: to provide the
necessary demographic material for Germanising the Warthegau; to
strengthen the then border area; and to improve agricultural
productivity by cutting up the lacifundia.

The existing situation was a blueprint of everything the SS planners
opposed, from the hierarchical class structure to the ungovernable and
unproductive agricultural proletariat, the unused potential of the land
and che racial/cultural mixture. In December 1940, a report of the
result of one year’s resettlement activity again attacked the idea of
making the Warthegau a haven for a German upper-class landed
gentry, using Polish labourers. This attack was from the SS Race and
Settlement office, and demonstrates how deeply Darré’s anti-Junker
views had penetrated the new planning bodies under Himmler.*°
Indeed, it is possibly for this reason that the old RUS advisory staff
had been dissolved by Himmler in late 1939.?° Their criticisms of
Goering repeated. almost word for word, remarks made by an RNS
member at Darré’s settlement conference in June 1940:37 ‘The faults of
Innere Kolonisation, which created a German upper class using Polish
labourers, to the detriment of the nation, must be avoided.’

These were Darré’s points; however, unlike Darré’s speeches, SS plans
were couched in the language of practical politics. Phrases like Blut und
Boden were missing, and the SS’s opponents in this matter—Goering
and the Wehrmacht High Commands—were seen as reactionaries with
outdated unscientific beliefs, whose obsessions about the social and

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economic value of large estates would soon enter the dustbin of
history. This belief in a more egalitarian farm and land ownership
structure was seen as the. modern, progressive and scientific norm.
Clearly, this interpretation was: worlds away from Darré’s rationale for
peasant farming, yet equally obviously it had been inspired and
influenced by it. Himmler’s romantic interest in medieval German
history seems not to have linked up with the ‘forward-looking’
workers in the RuS and RKFDV,; while in his practice, Himmler was
unenthusiastic about altering the Polish farm structure

RESETTLING THE VOLKSDEUTSCHE

In September 1939, the ethnic Germans who were to be involved
in the re-settlement programme fell, broadly speaking, into two
categories. There were those ethnic Germans who lived well to the east
of the incorporated areas, such as the Baltic Germans who had lost
their land under the Estonian, Lithuanian and Latvian land reforms of
the 1920s, and the more pressing problem of the German colonists
from Bessarabia and Wolhynia, some 160,000 people who had
originally been invited to settle by Russian and Russo-Polish nobles,
after 1815 and 1863 respectively. Under the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact,
Russia agreed to repatriate these German colonists, who lay in the path
of their invasion of eastern Poland.?°

The second category was that of the ethnic Germans living in situ
in Polish and Czech provinces which had been German/Austrian before
the First World War, together with the 750,000 or so refugees who
had left the Polish borderlands between 1919 and 1939, considered by
Germany to be refugees with a right to compensation by the Poles.3°
The ethnic Germans still living in Poland were referred to as
Reichsdeutsche by the German administration after their invasion of
Poland, a fact that confused the issue at the Nuremberg trials, where
the judges thought that the Reichsdeutsche in Poland were recent
immigrants from Germany; the reverse was the case.*° By 1942, it was
estimated that some 500,000 people were involved in the resettlement
programme. —

Despite Hitler’s well-publicised remarks about the South Tyrolean
Germans, for example, just sailing down the Danube to the Black Sea,
and finding a home there,4? the thrust of the re-settlement was
defensive rather than expansionist, and was seen as a definitive

consolidation of German territory. Homes had to be found for

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Poland: ‘Germany’s Ireland’

hundreds of thousands of refugees, and the incorporation of the newly
conquered territory in the east was, the answer to many problems.
There was the hope that it might include part of the rye-growing area
that had contributed to Poland’s massive grain exports before the war;
the population density was half that of Germany’s, which meant, it
was thought, free and empty territory for settling farmers,** while the
Volksdeutsche would fill the gap caused by the lack of German émigrés
from the Altreich prepared to go east. They would provide an

indisputably Germanised population in land that would now be l

German forever. Never again could plebiscites and percentages be a
weapon used against land colonised by German settlers.
This application of the concept of self-determination and ethnic

identity as a basis for nationhood—a complete reversal of the

expansionist liberalism of 1848, that proposed giving German
nationality to all Germans anywhere on earth—was applied in a
territory embittered by decades of strife. German claims of ill
treatment of their minorities in the inter-war years were not a figment
of Nazi imagination,** although, ironically enough, anti-German
activities appeared to have receded in Poland after the German-Polish
Friendship Treaty of 1934. There are great difficulties in judging the
true extent of atrocities against German civilians after 1939. For
example, the massacre of many Germans at Bromberg in September
1939 was inflated by Rosenberg to a figure of 50,000, while the post-
war Polish government admitted to 300. Contemporary accounts, and
the war-time trial of those responsible suggest that the real figure of
deaths was over 5,000.45 Militant Polish ex-soldiers and members of
nationalist fighting units had been given priority as new settlers in the
Polish border areas where the ‘Poniatowski’ villages were formed, a
fact that makes the mutual hatred and fear between Germans and Poles
on the border easier to understand.*° These remarks are not intended
in any way to excuse either the German invasion or the evacuation
measures that followed it, but rather to help to explain the attitude of
the German planners and administrators of the re-settlement
programme, men who were not monsters, but who implemented a
plan that caused endless suffering.

The total amount of territory annexed to form new German
counties in the east was 102,800 sq. km,*7” of which some seventy-five
per cent had been German territory before the First World War.
German law was introduced gradually, including the Reichsndahrstand
Marketing Law, which came into effect in January 1940.
Approximately eighty per cent of the twelve million population were

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Poland: ‘Germany’s Ireland’

Polish, 4.5 per cent Jewish, and some 15.5 per cent German. The
proportion of Jews within the population was considerably smaller
than in eastern Poland, as. the main areas of Jewish settlement lay in
regions which had been Russian and Austrian prior to 1918.

The RKFDV decree of October 1939 authorised the Reichsführer
SS to create new settlement areas, protect the Deutsche Volksgemeinschaft
from ‘damaging influences’, and above all, organise the retum of
Germans living outside the boundaries of Germany.*® Clause 3 of the
decree gave the task of creating ‘new peasants’ to the Ministry of
Agriculture, under the RKFDV’s jurisdiction.

The RKFDV’s creation was a shock to the Race and Settlement
Office (now called the RuS) which had expected to run the re-
settlement. Local staff offices had been established in Danzig, Silesia and
West Prussia for the event, and detailed maps had been drawn up of
each parish by the Race and Settlement advisory staff, work that was
later taken over by the SS planning staff in Posen and Lodz under
Konrad Meyer. Negotiations took place with the civil government in
the occupied area in October, the office offering to place itself under
the jurisdiction of the local governor, but Himmler set up a parallel
organisation of planning experts which rendered the Settlement
advisory staff effectively redundant.*? In late November, 1939, they
were transferred to the RKFDV under the aegis of the police chief in
Danzig, SS Gruppenführer Hildebrandt, jointly to run Land Offices for
the implementation of the 7th October 1939 decree in Silesia, Danzig
and Posen.5°

Pancke suggested immediately organising his now ‘anderemployed
staff into Vorkommandos who would be sent into villages to evacuate
the Polish inhabitants, and prevent them destroying livestock or crops.
He accompanied this idea with a request for funds to cover weapons,
transport, and so on, and an exemption from Wehrmacht military
duty, and gave details of estates that could be taken over for use as SS
training farms (Lehrgiiter).5*

This enthusiasm was restrained by a meeting with Himmler some
days later, when the representative of the civil government, SS Freiherr
von Holzschuher, was present. Himmler ordered that the proposed
Land Office be subjected to the RKFDV office, now under SS
Brigade-Führer Greifelt. As for the training farms, he agreed that
suitable land (especially if formerly owned by the church) should be
seized and prepared, but that no training of ‘new peasants’ should be
carried out while the war was on. The plans went into absurd detail,
but the memorandum of this meeting shows that while Himmler’s

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Poland: ‘Germany’s Ireland’

directions about co-operation with the police, and his administrative
orders, were clear, his ideas about the actual settlement of formerly
Polish villages were not; and that Pancke’s enthusiasm to begin
operations was being heavily controlled from the centre.5?

The Race and Settlement Office had been financed at the
beginning of the war from the Prague Land Office, but by December
1939 this source of funds had dried up.5? Pancke sent Himmler some
of their reports, to ‘show what excellent work they are doing’,54
settling South Tyroleans in Kreise Saybusch, but Himmler seemed, if
anything, alarmed at the verve and speed of the operation: ‘The work
they have performed is certainly interesting, but to my mind is at this

moment premature. Where exactly are these RuS Beratung people.

now, and what are they working on?’55
Later, he was to apologise indirectly to Pancke for the dissolution
of the RuS advisory staff, and the takeover by the RKFDV:

Your own position [as head of the RuS] does not play any
special part in my work as Reichskommissar, because in fact I
would otherwise like to give the RuSHA perhaps an even
greater task; however, the joint role would endanger
relationships between us and all the Ministries, which is not to
be sneezed at.5¢

Between December 1939 and December 1940, events seemed
continually to run ahead of planning, but, cumbersomely, the re-

settlement proceeded, amid complaints that the SS was being starved.

of funds by the Ministry of Agriculture, and attacks on the Settlement
societies for ‘interfering with ethnic German re-settlement’.57 Von dem
Bach apologised to Pancke that only 1,000 people a day were being
evacuated from Upper Silesia, instead of the planned 4,000. With no
central water supply in most of the Polish towns, and the danger of
typhus in the summer months, establishing transit camps was itself no
easy task.°® The planned rapid evacuation of Polish farmers was not
taking place, and all large buildings that seemed suitable were bought
by the RKFDV for temporary accommodation for the Volksdeutsche.

In December 1939, the plan was to evacuate 400,000 Poles to make
way for around 200,000 Volksdeutsche, of whom some 120,000 were
expected immediately, most on foot. Categories for deportation to the
G-G included all Jews, Polish peasants whose land was being taken for
the Wolhynien Germans, and any Poles related to those killed in the
fighting, who were described as a security risk.5°

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Poland: ‘Germany’s Ireland’

The Wolhynien Germans did not in fact begin to arrive until the
spring of 1940, after complex negotiations with the Russians, and the
implementation of a refugee treaty concerning those Poles (some
60,000) who had fled to Russian-occupied territory after Germany’s
invasion, but who now wanted to return. RuS officials went to
Russian-occupied territory to. oversee the evacuation of the
Wolhyniens and Bessarabians. Uncertainty surrounded their evacuation:
Pancke claimed that he was not told to prepare for their arrival until
February or March 1940.6°

The colonists arrived with the minimum of luggage and
possessions. They were confined to fifty kilos per family, and had

‘concentrated on bringing with them seeds and farming implements.

‘The negotiations with the Soviet Union went without friction; the
officials were extremely korrekt’, commented Hoffmeyer approvingly,
although ‘It was sometimes difficult to communicate with such
completely opposed points of view. Also, one had to get used to the
fact that time and punctuality in general meant nothing to the
Russians.’°! This meant hours or days waiting at stations at
temperatures sometimes twenty degrees below freezing, while lost train
carriages were found, and Soviet officials borrowed pencils and paper

from the Germans. Even under war-time conditions, the incorporated

area was a paradise of plenty compared to areas under Russian rule.
However, more panic-stricken confusion awaited the unfortunate
Volksdeutsche in Germany, where no one seemed to be in charge of the
project, or to have any idea of how many people were involved.®?

Pending the provision of suitable farms, returning ethnic Germans
were placed in transit camps within the Reich as well as in the
incorporated areas. The Waffen SS, with its chronic shortage of
manpower, recruited as many of their youths as possible, while families
were sometimes split up by recruitment by labour organisations to work
in the Altreich. The National Socialist Welfare. Organisation helped with
the provision of furniture and clothes, while the RKFDV provided
pocket money for those in camps, and other welfare services.®*

Evacuation orders regarding Polish farmers were strict in their
allowances of furniture and livestock; the farmers were supposed to
leave behind heavy furniture and cows and horses. However, in
practice, they seem to have taken all they could with them, while the
buildings and crops that remained were often damaged by relatives of
the evacuated Poles. In many cases, the evacuated Poles were moved
only to the next village along, and the re-settled Volksdeutsche feared
their presence.®4

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Poland: ‘Germany’s Ireland’

The returnees varied considerably in their experience of farming,
their abilities and education. Bessarabian Germans turned out to be
especially difficult to settle in farms, and in December 1940 Himmler
ordered them to be put into labour battalions instead.65 Relations
between different groups were sometimes tense, as indeed they were
between returnees and the old-established Reichsdeutsche families in the
incorporated areas.

Himmler had ordered in January 1940 that ‘despite the joy these
Germans feel on returning to their homeland, every encouragement
must be given in order to make their adaptation to the new
surroundings, and the rebuilding of their lives easier’.6© But among the

substantial element of integrated Reichsdeutsche, usually estate owners `

and managers who had intermarried with Poles over generations, the
newcomers were despised rather than welcomed as racial comrades. In
the eyes of the SS administration, many of these integrated Germans
had ‘gone native’, and become quite Polish in their lifestyle; they
presented a special ideological problem to the administrators of the
newly conquered territory. ‘Those Reichsdeutsche who own or manage
large farms have personal friendship with Poles and drink with them.
Unfriendliness towards the Volksdeutsche is a commonplace.’6” What
was even worse, some Poles were too friendly with the Reichsdeutsche.
Local NSDAP welfare workers found their sense of nationalist
propriety offended when they heard, for example, Polish maids singing
German nationalist songs in a Reichsdeutsche household.®* Class loyalty
appeared to be a stronger force than racial solidarity in relations

between the new immigrants and the old, at least, where large and.

medium landowners were concerned.

By mid-1940, thirty-five camps had been established around
Lodz and other towns in the eastern zone of the incorporated areas,
most of them adapted from empty factories and summer homes.
120,000 people had passed through them by summer, while by the
end of 1940 some half a million ethnic Germans altogether had ‘heard
the call of the Führer and returned to the Greater German
homeland’.®® Less than half, however, had found farms, possibly
fewer, if the figure given was inflated for publication. Nonetheless,
as the report pointed out, that meant that an area of land the size of
Oldenburg had been ‘Germanised’ in West Prussia, Upper Silesia and
the Wartheland. Up to this date, the idea of a peasant settlement
was still dominant. “The work has just begun. The external incorporation
of land must march together with internal Germanisation ...
Volk borders are more decisive than national ones’.7? Some ethnic

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Poland: ‘Germany’s Ireland’

Germans, however, were reluctant to return to rural life, especially che
Baltic Germans.” t

The shortage of labour in agriculture and industry—in Germany
especially—overtook re-settlement plans by the end of 1941. The
transports of Poles to the G-G were suspended in March 1941 because
of the shortage of labour”? by which time some 400,000 Poles had
been evacuated and 167,450 ethnic Germans settled in their place. The
SS Planning Staff at Posen called in vain for further evacuations,
arguing that after the war was over, American-European relations
would be at a low ebb, and that refugee German settlers from North
America could be expected to arrive!’

The Planning Staff did their best to help the Volksdeutsche settle in,
providing libraries and language courses for them, and attempting to
fit suitable tradesmen to the right jobs.”4 The attitudes of the Poles
varied from entirely hostile to passive, with even some active
friendliness shown tó the new arrivals in their often desperate straits.
Greifelt commented, ‘In general, the Polish section of the population
have not shown themselves to be friendly to the German resettlers and
the resettlement commandos, but have also not been directly hostile.’75
This situation was not to last.

The easiest answer to the joint problems of shortage of labour and
Polish returnees (both from the Russian-occupied area and the G-G),
was to conscript Polish men and women as forced labour, and deport
them to the West, to work in Germany and France.’ Polish dwarf
farms provided most of the workers, and the smallholdings that were
vacated were then consolidated for German resettlement. In fifteen
parishes around Lodz, over 500,000 hectares were resettled in this way
(half by Volksdeutsche peasants, and half by returning Germans from
the old Reich). The SS planning staff at Lodz complained that this still
left 750,000 hectares locally in the hands of Polish smallholders, which
could be made into 40,000 medium-sized farms, which ‘would break
the Polish influence’, and enable the land to be used for intensive
fodder production, more animal rearing, sugar beet and vegetables.’’

Obviously, RNS ideology had found fertile ground in the SS
Planning Offices at Posen and Lodz, and indeed there was a
considerable increase in food production in the occupied areas under
their management; however, whether this was due to resettlernent or
to the doubling of tractor numbers and import of ploughs and drills
from Germany, is unclear.”®

The implementation of more intensive and modernised farming
encountered the problem of land shortage. When the Germans invaded

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Poland: “Germany’s Ireland’

the Wartheland, there were 3.2 million agriculturally usable hectares,
but the first priority in a plan drawn up by the RKFDV Land
Planning Office was to set aside nearly 500,000 hectares for
afforestation, as well as 100,000 hectares for the Wehrmacht, and
620,000 hectares for new roads, industrial areas, suburbs and so on.
This immediately cut down the available agriculturally usable land to
2.6 million hectares. 800,000 hectares of this was allocated in 1941 to
the Volksdeutsche, although they settled only some 300,000 hectares.??
Despite the available free land, the existing houses and buildings
which had belonged to evacuated Polish farmers, attempts at
intensifying farming suflered from the lack of labour and machinery

that had beset German agriculture in the Altreich. Difficult climatic

conditions were exacerbated by the lack of hedges and copses; a long
winter and a dry spring produced problems that had to be solved by
altered farming methods. ‘The aim must be to confine cattle rearing to
one cow per two hectares, and have an intensive arable rotation of
sugar beet, catch crops and potatoes for pig feed’, wrote Hermann
Priebe in Neues Bauerntum. He attacked ideas about peasant autarky as
mere sentiment, and called for more machinery, artificial fertiliser and
aids for milk production to be made available to the new farms of the
Warthegau.®°

Under the trustee system, whereby German farmers were sent out
to manage Polish farms, production improvements did come about.
However, by December 1942, re-settlement had virtually ceased
(which did not stop Himmler laying down directives for cultivation
and planning). By December 1942, only the 35,000 or so new
Volksdeutsche farms remained of the ‘blonde province’. Every aspect of
the original plan, save only the increase in food production, had failed.
Even racially, ‘in exceptional circumstances, persons of mixed race are
to be admitted to the Reich’.®2 Germanisation in the incorporated
areas meant in effect the attempted Germanisation of some eighty-five
per cent of the existing population there, while those Volksdeutsche still
in transit camps at the end of 1942 were utilised for labour battalions
in Germany.®? Perhaps fortunately, they had developed ‘a certain
fatalism as a result of war and revolution’.®*

This necessarily brief look at the Volksdeutsche re-settlement
programme has obviously ignored many factors which are important
in a wider context. One problem is that the welfare aspect of the
programme was considerable, and dominates the archival material. As
Koehl points out, the picture that emerges from the RKFDV and
RuSHA documents is overwhelmingly one of humaneness, with caring

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personnel distributing pocket money and showing ethnic German
wives how to mend clothes. This took place, however, against a
background of forced evacuation, dispossession, draconian anti-Polish
legislation and racial bitterness that must be mentioned here, if only to
clarify the postin of the new settlers who are the subject of this
section.®5

While frequently the subject of personal kindness from the Polish
majority, the ethnic Germans were also obliged to build up homes and
farms from scratch, in conditions of poverty and shortage. Many no
longer spoke fluent German, but. were expected to demonstrate the
virtues of German culture to their Polish neighbours. Understandably,
they were subject to sporadic physical attacks from partisans and Polish
villagers. Far from being the new German homeland which they had
been promised, the incorporated area was an alien territory of flat
wastelands, a wilderness stretching endlessly into mournful sunsets,
where the unprotected emptiness of the eastern horizon exacerbated the
fundamental agoraphobia of many of the settlers. ®°

It emerges clearly from the reports, diaries and memoirs of the
German administrators that the resettled Germans suffered a poverty as
great as that of the Polish villagers, despite the efforts of welfare
visitors and other officials. Furthermore, many of the new settlers came

‘from farming communities where techniques were primitive. New

methods had to be learnt, with concomitant delays in successful
production.87

For most of these groups, their eventual fate was worse than if they
had remained behind, for the end of the re-settlement period was
poignantly tragic. Driven west by the advancing Russian army,
murdered en masse by Polish partisans, subject to every -untrammelled
atrocity that troops fuelled by years of hate propaganda and reaction to
the terror of the Einsatzgruppen, could devise, the degree of their
destruction will probably never be known for certain.88 Along with
the many millions of East Prussians who fled west in 1945, all that was
left of the ethnic German returnees at the end of the war was an
incoherent, fragmented body of survivors. Not only did several
hundred years of European history disappear with their physical
demise, but their fate was to be either ignored or interpreted as the just
deserts of German imperialism. 8°

German agricultural settlement was not an integral part of
Himmler’s institutional expansion, but was an obsession of his staff, and
popular with the majority of SS members. Himmler appears to have

seized the opportunities offered in 1938 when settlement ideology was

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Poland: ‘Germanys Ireland’

conjoined with the sudden prospect of territorial expansion. Jan Gross
suggests in his work on Poland under the Nazis that the Nazi creed
was incapable of coping with the concept of empire, that both Nazi
racialism and its emphasis on institutionalised ‘personalism’ was
incompatible with the creation of a real ‘New Order’.?° Himmler’s
importance lay in the fact that he, almost alone among many other
Nazis, was ideologically and temperamentally capable of thinking in
imperial terms. This helps to account for his rapid seizure of power in
the occupied territories; Himmler was a new phenomenon in National
Socialism, representing its (perhaps inevitable) transformation into the
full Fascist state: imperialist thus anti-nationalist; élitist not populist;
seeking the efficient, planned—and rootless—European super-state. This

dimension helps to account for the fact that by 1944 more than half

the Waffen SS were non-German. The role of the Volksdeutsche
settlement in Himmler’s plans was to provide a valuable element of
apparent continuity of aim through Konrad Meyer’s Land Office;
through the appeal to the old German desire to recover its lost emigres
and consolidate its frontiers. It helped to camouflage the qualitative
distinction between SS hegemony in occupied Europe and previous
ambitions,?! but its real purpose was to open the door to strategic
control of a new empire in the east.

In the pursuit of that empire, Himmler discovered that racial purity
could give way to a supra-racial and supra-national categorisation that
magically enabled a vast source of manpower to become available. By
re-labelling, people could be drawn into the system and ranked on a
scale of Germanism. The concept lost racial and national meaning, and

became a means of grading usable human material, ‘began to acquire `

an achievement dimension’.°? The Volksliste became a sifting procedure
to procure potential citizens of the New Order: loyal, healthy, and
possessed of five fingers on each hand.??

For many SS personnel in Himmler’s empire, the well-being of the
ethnic Germans had been of intrinsic importance; the correspondence
between SS offices stressing importance of settlement as late as January
1945 is evidence to that effect.9°* However, control of the ethnic
German re-settlement programme by Himmler played another role in
the SS’s drive to total dominance; by enabling them to control land
use and distribution in the occupied territories, it put them in control
of possibly the most vital raw material in all the conquered
territories—land itself. There was no inevitability about the emergence
of this domination. Himmler had to compete against Rosenberg,
Commissar for the East, the Four Year Plan civil authority, the

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Poland: ‘Germany’s Treland’

Wehrmacht High Command administration, as well as the Foreign

Ministry and Ministry of Agriculture. The story of that struggle is not.

part of this work; what is involved here is the interplay of agrarian and
racial ideology behind the most comprehensive attempt to institute
German peasant settlement between 1933 and 1945.9°

That barely a third of the returnees received farms, and that the

remainder worked in German factories or lived in transit camps all

over the Altreich shows, once again, the extent to which the apparent
ideological aims of the Third Reich were subordinated to the aim of
maintaining control, of survival at all costs.?® There can be no doubt
that the re-settlement of some 250,000 people within eighteen months
was a major achievement compared with the lethargic New Peasant
settlement over the previous seven years; yet after the invasion of
Russia, when the war can be said to have entered its most ideological
stage, re-settlement virtually ceased. When the aim of racial and
national rescue competed with the aim of imperial expansion, the latter
came first.

Clearly, there was an ideological component in the re-settlement
programme, which affected its mechanics in particular. It was assumed
that peasants would continue to farm, that.a peasant territory would be
more truly ‘German’ in a populist sense. It was also an improvised
response to a sudden emergency, a ‘dictated option’?”, and the fusion
of Darréan Blut und Boden ideology, demographic-national aims, and
agrarian reform in coping with this emergency has been the subject of
this chapter.

In 1940, Himmler had announced that German, (Altreich and
Reichsdeutsche) settlement would have to wait until after the war.?®
Barely one year later, the invasion of Russia completely terminated
any possibility of implementing the Volksdeutsche programme,?? so that
the revamped version of agricultural settlement suffered the same fate
as the earlier programme. Nevertheless, it has been suggested that
German agricultural settlement was a cause of German expansion into
the Ukraine and Russia.1°° While food production certainly was
important in Hitler’s calculations, German settlement there seems not
to have been envisaged.10! The bulk of the re-settlement planning was
carried out—often after the event—as has been described—between
1939 and 1941; it faltered after that date, and settlement ideology can
hardly be blamed for Himmler’s exploitative aims in the east for a
new ‘source of raw materials’. As for the deportation of half a million
Poles from the Warthegau, the reduction to ghettos and final
evacuation of its Jewish population—the first was only in part

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Poland: ‘Germany’s Ireland’.

connected with the planned exchange of population for the purposes of
the re-settlement, the second not at all. The conscription of Poles for
labour in, Germany was more a consequence of the untrammelled,
exploitative ideology of the Nazis at war than of any rural ideology,
and certainly not Darré’s.

Acts of revenge taken on Poles who had been members of
nationalist groups; the oppression and corruption of a conquered
people after an invasion: these also can hardly be laid at the door of
the plan to re-settle ethnic Germans in the incorporated areas. Yet
because of the plan’s emphasis on race, as opposed to nationality, it has
attracted especial vilification. Clearly, any programme of forced
evacuation and dispossession involves great suffering. But whether the
programme was inspired by a desire for national expansion, ideological]
hegemony or racial consolidation (as exemplified respectively by
Polish, Russian and German expansion between 1918 and 1945) hardly
affects the experience of the event either for those who suffered or for
those who survive.

170

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Green Nazis

Today it would be difficult to ignore fears about erosion, the
destruction of animal species, anxieties about factory farming, the social
effects of technology and the loss of farmland. Such issues are discussed
constantly in the mass media, as well as in the output of special interest
groups. When Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, she focussed the
world’s attention on the ecological destruction caused by pesticides and
other chemicals in the lakes and earth of North America. What has
become known as the ‘ecological movement’, especially the party-
political ‘Green’ aspect, implies also a broadly-based cultural criticism
of the development of western civilisation. Its emphasis on technology,
foreign trade, the division of labour, its urbanisation and inherent
anomie are all seen as social and spiritual evils. Labour-intensive energy
conservation, autarky, re-cycling resources and living close to the land
are seen as inherently good.! l

On the whole, ecologists do not call for a return to pre-industrial
ways of life as such. They tend rather to stress research into new forms
of technology which are more suitable to small communities, and
which would avoid damaging the balance of nature to the extent
observable today. Where ecologists have moved into party politics,
they are associated with international and pacifist sentiment which is
collectivist in spirit, and propounds re-distribution of the earth’s
resources—sometimes re-distribution of life’s miseries—with the zeal of
an inquisitor. These ideas are more dominant in northern Europe and
America than elsewhere. Although there is a small ecological
movement in France, it has remained inconsiderable in terms of its
political and social influence. It is in Germany, above all, that the
Greens have obtained their greatest influence and publicity to date.

It is not widely known that similar ecological ideas were being put
forward by Darre in National Socialist Germany, often using the same
phrases and arguments as are used today. He began to campaign for
these ideas, especially organic farming, from 1934 onwards, and during
the Second World War stepped up the effort to introduce organic
farming methods into Germany. After the war, as a broken, discredited

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politician, he continued to write about. soil erosion, the dangers of
artificial fertilisers and the need to maintain the ‘biomass’, until his
death in 1953. Two decades later, these ideas about man’s relationship
with nature and the organic cycle of animal-soil-food-man known as
organic farming, had gained wider attention. Today, they have crossed
party political boundaries, and adherents can be found across the
political spectrum: They have, in fact, become part of everyone’s
mental furniture. Were Darré’s ecological ideas integral to his other
views, or were they irrelevant? Was it just an embarrassing accident
that he should have hit on questions which preoccupy us today? Was
there a serious ecological movement in the 1930s that was able to co-
exist with National Socialism? Or was it in a sense ‘alternative’, as—I
have argued—could be said of Darré’s ideas?

The two decades before the First World War saw the growth of
the Wandervégel, the roaming bands of students who took to the woods
and mountains of Germany in search of new ways of life. They were
opposed to urban anomie and alienation. At the same time, the works
of Rudolf Steiner and the Anthroposophy movement were gathering
support. While accepting Darwinian evolution, Steiner, an Austrian
Catholic, propounded spiritual, vitalist ideas, and feared the
despoliation of the earth. His ideas included astrology, reincarnation
and the importance of magnetism. But it was his opposition to the
exploitation of the soil that was the most influential element. The
German Youth Movement had a potent back-to-the-land element, that
was more practical and communally-oriented than Steiner’s
individualistic emphasis. After the First World War, several agricultural
settlement groups were formed. They had a Tolstoyan flavour, and
one quoted Gandhi’s attack on industrial society, ‘Machinery is the
Greatest Sin’. Self-help and the Spartan ideal characterised these
groups, which aimed to resettle the German borderlands in the east.
Their magazines carried songs and pictures in the spirit of the pre-war
Youth Movement, whose illustrator, Fidus, lived in a wood with a
large family, rather like Augustus John. Fidus, described by one writer
as a ‘Jugendstil hippy’, was an old man when the Nazis came to power:
Darré sent him enthusiastic greetings in 1938 on his seventieth
birthday.?

Much of Darré’s influence among serious agriculturalists came from
the fact that his programme combined economic as well as moral
arguments in favour of the peasantry. However, his attitude to
technology as it affected the peasantry (technology which was needed
for higher productivity) varied. For example, in a post-war work,

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Darré, writing under the pseudonym Carl Carlsson, attacked technology
for dissolving ancient forms of being. It created new forms of social
organisation—the market as overlord, the division of labour (on and
between different farms) and an exploitative attitude to the land. He
described the petrol-driven engine as a technological form that should

have profoundly altered the relationship of peasant to technology: it

did not do so because industry and government were obsessed by large
farms, huge machines and the examples of American and Russian
large-scale farming.? Here again we come to a further facet of Darré’s
opposition to the entire structure of German life as it had developed.
Monolithic size, latifundian scale—the whole concept of Spengler’s
megalopolis, were in Darré’s view the result of culturally destructive
foreign influences: and all institutions—law, church, education—were
the product of the victors, and must go. This was clearly an anti-
conservative stance, and the similarity of these ideas with today’s Third
World anti-colonial movements is not surprising. Germany in the
1920s was reeling from defeat and a cultural inferiority complex. This
helps to explain the explosion of dissatisfaction, radical revolt, and
desire for a new society that characterised Weimar Germany.

Steiner’s ideas did not put the peasantry first, nor did they show
much interest in farmers as a group. His emphasis on individual
personality and development, astrology and reincarnation, made no
appeal to Darré. In fact, he had a running battle with Seifert, a
landscape architect who specialised in ‘embedding motorways in the
landscape ... organically’, and who worked for Dr Fritz Todt. Todt
accused Seifert of being a fanatical ecologist in 1936, but by 1939 the
two men had compromised.* Seifert was probably the unnamed but
influential ecologist in the Todt Organisation who, according to Backe,
in 1939 persuaded Hitler to put a stop to any further land
improvement in Germany, on the grounds that drainage and similar
projects would ruin Germany’s water table (shades of the Amazon
Forest today). Seifert criticised Darré’s land improvement schemes,
arguing that they would lead to a dust bowl, as in North America. He
described the modernisation of German agriculture that was taking
place under Darré as a disastrous interference with ecological balance,
which would lead to fungal and insect infestation. He wanted
agricultural practice to mimic nature according to the most stringent
organic farming prescriptions, avoiding weeding, ploughing or
monoculture. Wild plant life should be left to provide a source of
disease resistance potential.© Darré responded that the RMEL was
concerned for Germany’s ecology ‘as far as this is possible, without

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endangering the safety of the nation’, and described Seifert’s articles on
magnetism and other Steiner ideas as ‘false, fantastic scribbling’.
Seifert’s view on the benefits of wild nature was a ‘Rousseauvian
concept’, then, as now, an insult among nationalists, implying a
Utopian and simple-minded optimism about Nature and the natural
man. ‘Healthy’ and ‘sick’ were man-made concepts, he argued; insects
and bacteria were as ‘natural’ as their prey, but man had the right to
protect himself.

While the battle for life among all species expresses itself
everywhere freely in the free state of nature, this is not
permissible with cultivated plants, because man must intervene
for reasons of self-preservation in order to guarantee ... Its
harvest for man’s own food supply ... The present want of
space within German territory forces us in ever increasing ways
to make the soil more and more serviceable.”

Here, Darré disassociated himself from the ‘Nature-before-man’
arguments of the extreme ecologists. His emphasis on the essential
artificiality of human life, the need to direct nature, parallels his belief
in the need to protect man, the domesticated animal, from the effects
of domestication. This, as Konrad Lorenz’s biographer has argued, was
a common view at the time.® Indeed, it is hard to dispute the fact that
man no longer exists in a state of nature. This was one of the
preconceptions of all interventionist social reformers, that, once away
from a state of nature, man needed scientific guidance and control.
Darré’s twist to the argument was that it was necessary to live more
naturally, to be closer to nature, in order to guide and control the
harmful effects of over-civilisation. In his enthusiasm for using the
latest scientific discoveries to improve society and become less
scientific, Darré showed his inheritance from the Darwinian radicals of
late nineteenth century Germany, and especially Haeckel, founder of
the Monist League, and much admired by Bolsche, the populariser of
biology. Haeckel’s views on the nervous system fused Darwinian
natural selection with some Lamarckian factors, and towards the end of
the century, his monist materialism became more and more a monist
vitalism: his holistic view of the world was similar to Darré’s (indeed,
he is supposed to have invented the word *Ecology’).?

Steiner was an enthusiastic supporter of evolutionary theory, and
wrote several essays on Darwin and evolution before the First World
War. He felt that evolutionary theory could blend with spiritualist

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determinants. Steiner’s followers were to branch out in several

directions, including Theosophy, and the religious character of these

developments irritated Darré.

However, he gradually realised that many of Steiner’s arguments
could be useful, and he became prepared to adapt them, announcing
that he would rename ‘Biological-dynamic agriculture’, the Steiner
term, ‘organic farming’.!0 He commented in August 1940, just after
his organic farming campaign began, that he saw the peasant as ‘a
biological function in the body politic (Volkskérper) ... The peasant’s
agricultural activity [is] not just a matter of production, but a means of
maintaining the Idea of Peasantness itself.’ ‘Biological-dynamism’ was

` compatible with peasant farming. In its complete disavowal of

industrial projects—artificial fertiliser, | mass-produced grain,
insecticides—it rejected industrial capitalism. The alleged discovery of a
letter from a major chemical firm, proving that it had instigated an
attack on organic farming, helped to confirm Darré’s stance
(unfortunately, the letter itself disappeared from the files after their
capture by the Allies).**

Whatever the emphasis, Darré always rationalised his views. He
claimed in public to support organic farming because it seemed the
sensible sane way to farm, producing nutritious food without

' damaging the soil; privately, because it helped the peasant cause. He

supported methane gas plants and suitable machinary for small farms.
In 1935, he claimed that ‘our forefathers had always unconsciously
venerated trees and other living plants. We now know that plants gave
out useful and desirable chemicals, so that old plant physiology was
unconsciously very efficient.” This remark was followed by two pages
of chemical analysis of plants, drawn from a technical article in a
scientific journal; a good example of Darré’s tendency to justify ideas
with scientific data, presented in a journalistic but well-organised
way.12

Steiner’s philosophy attracted several prominent NSDAP members,
including Rudolf Hess, and lesser functionaries, such as Dr A.
Ludovici, land planning officer in Hess’s office, and Ludolf Haase,
brought into the Ministry of Agriculture after 1942 by Backe.!?
Steiner’s mysticism, individualism and dislike of organised politics
made his followers suspect to the Gestapo. The movement had
Utopian and pacifist tendencies, and formed a rival neo-religion of
powerful persuasiveness. Heydrich criticised it in October 1941, in a
letter to Darré, for being an élitist philosophy: ‘Not a Weltanschauung
suitable for the whole nation, but a special teaching for a closely

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confined circle’, and remarked that although currently masquerading as
a nationalistic German ideology, it was fundamentally oriental in
nature, and unsuited for ‘a Germanic people’.14 Backe’s papers contain
a cryptic message from Gauleiter Eggeling, the man in the powerful
position of Keeper of the Seal after 1937, referring to Himmler’s
interest in ‘organic ideas’ after Darré’s fall.1*

Darré wrote several articles oh ecological themes between 1933 and
1936. Some were on the dangers of erosion, some on the lessons of the
depression for agriculture. His work looked at the example of
America, and dwelt on the anti-erosion measures carried out under
Roosevelt. Large farms, he argued, had been hit harder than smaller,
more self-sufficient farms. It now might be more ‘economic’ to use
horse-drawn ploughs than combine harvesters. +$ .

As the Nazi government began to tighten up on its opponents
many of Darré’s supporters began to face harassment. Darré, by now,
faced suspicion. But contemporary accounts refer to him as a
prominent and popular figure. While Darré fought in meetings for
higher food prices and more resources for agriculture, farmers who
followed Steiner’s ideas were pestered by local NSDAP men.

Food production and self-sufficiency were a major preoccupation
for Germany at this time, and the Reichnährstand was interested in ways
of increasing both. Although not a follower of Steiner himself, Darré
had several supporters of Steiner on his staff, and was exposed to their
arguments. While Steiner’s emphasis on astrology, reincarnation and
magnetism made no appeal, Darré realised that it was opposed to
‘liberal, mechanistic’ ideas. He lifted from the movement its belief that
the soil was a living organism, part of a vital cycle of growth and
decay. If this cycle was tempered with, valuable nutrients would be
lost, and affect the food eaten by man.!?

Steiner asked Dr Eduard Bartsch to start a farm on organic fine: in
the sandy soil of the Mark. Bartsch founded a society for organic
farming, and was also an active Anthroposophist.!® The experimental
farm at Marienhöhe kept crop returns and studied farm figures in their
monthly journal Demeter, together with appeals for more hedgerows,
shelter belts, drainage and organic compost. Occasionally, the inner
spirit of the movement was revealed by quotations from Steiner:

We need a better knowledge of man,
Health through natural living,

Harmony between Blood, Soil and Cosmos,
Life reform as a national aim,

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Knowledge and Life,
The Rule of the Living. +’

Undeterred by party hostility, the organic farmers campaigned to.
win over Darré and his staff. They invited Nazi ministers to visit their
farms. The National Food Estate held a meeting in 1937 with Hess,
Bormann and Darré, to discuss the question.?? At this time, the ‘Battle
for Production’ for more food was in full swing. It emphasised
increased use of artificial fertilisers, together with better seeds and
livestock. Hess, who, together with several members of his staff,
supported Steiner, was in favour of experimenting with organic

‘farming, while Bormann strongly opposed it. The meeting ended

inconclusively, but by 1940 many RNS members had been converted
by the results at Marienhöhe, particularly after its humus-rich soil
managed to produce a good crop during a prolonged drought.
Reports favouring organic farms appeared in Landpost in 1940.21

Darré seems to have become fully converted to organic farming by
May 1940. He realised that organic farms were more self-sufficient in
terms of bought-in fertilisers and insecticides, and hence more in line
with the self-sufficiency aims of the Ministry of Agriculture. The anti-
capitalist implications appealed, too. Organic farming rejected

“industrial capitalism as well as the products of the big chemical

companies. Darré organised a campaign to persuade the top Nazi leaders
to support ‘biological-dynamic’ farming. He argued, ironically in the
circumstances, that ‘now that the war is over, we can concentrate on
these matters’, a phrase which gives some idea of his lack of contact
with the top Nazi leadership at this stage. He circulated a questionnaire
among all Gauleiters and Reichsleiters, disassociating himself from
Steiner’s mystical ideas, but proposing that information should be
collected on the virtues of organic farming. He had prepared his
campaign carefully, squeezing a loosely worded promise out of
Goering that he could go ahead without interference, and stressing that
he fully supported the principles of the ‘Battle for Production’.2?
Surprisingly, given the tense moment in Germany’s history, the
campaign aroused a great deal of interest. All the leaders replied except
Hitler. Out of the replies still on file, seven were in favour of organic
farming and Steiner, three unsure, three hostile because of the link
with Steiner, and nine just hostile, mostly because of the wartime
conditions. Surprising support emerged in the form of Hjalmar
Schacht, Darré’s old enemy. He told. Darré that he was in complete

sympathy with his views ‘on German agriculture, despite their

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disagreements ‘on details’ in the past: and was horrified at the
‘hypertrophy of the agricultural sector’, the ‘capitalistic concentration
in individual hands’ of recent years. He regretted the extent to which
Darré’s originally good concept had been turned into its complete
opposite, and offered any help he could. A strange irony here; no less
an opponent than Hjalmar Schacht, apparently won over to Darré’s
viewpoint, at a time when it was too late for either man, and far too
late for Darré’s Agrarpolitik. Bormann and Goering both reacted angrily
against what they saw as an attempt to interfere with existing methods
of food production.?3 Darré tried to see Hitler, but was warned off by
Backe, who advised Darré that Hitler had ordered protection to be
removed from ex-members of the Anthroposophist Association.?4

The campaign was interrupted by Hess’s flight to Britain in May.
1941. On 9th June, the Gestapo seized anyone who was known to
support Steiner, including Hans Merkel of the NFE, later Darré’s
defence lawyer at Nuremberg, and Dr Eduard Bartsch, editor of
Demeter, copies of which were seized and destroyed. The few
remaining copies today are in Himmler’s files. Pharmaceutical works
making organic products were also closed, with the exception’ of the
Weleda factory (still in existence) which Otto Ohlendorf managed to
keep open. Seifert complained to Darré that all members of the
National Union for Biological-Dynamic farming had been searched.
Despite a letter from Bormann, warning Darré that Hitler was behind
the arrests, Darré, undeterred, appointed a working committee on
organic farming, and wrote to Himmler and Heydrich asking them to stop
arresting and harassing his farmers (and others, such as the nudists).25

Some extent of Heydrich’s view of organic farming allied to the
panic of his post-Hess investigations can be gauged from this extract
from a letter to Darré of 18th October, 1941:

I have had far-reaching investigations made into the connections
between Anthroposophy and biological-dynamic farming in
recent months. From a report on Anthroposophy, which I
enclose, it appears that bio-dynamic farming emerged from the
spirit of Anthroposophy, and can only be understood in
connection with it. In practical terms it is obvious that Dr
Bartsch, especially, of Bad Saarow, is at the same time a
dedicated follower of Anthroposophy, and the leading
representative of bio-dynamic farming ... Despite its temporary .
appearance of German nationalism, Anthroposophy is essentially
oriental in its nature and origin.26

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Even Darré’s ardent supporters felt that his timing was faulty and that
he had gone too far. One member of his staff described his action as
‘grotesque and politically dangerous’.27 But after the flurry of arrests
caused by Hess’s flight had died down, Darré continued to collect
material on ‘biological-dynamic’ farming.

_ Bearing in mind Heydrich’s persecution of the Anthroposophists
and all their works, it is surprising that so many did support organic
farming. At this time, the Anthroposophists were the dominant
proponents of these ideas, and it is interesting to note that the brave
handful of top Nazis who resisted Heydrich in this matter had their
children educated and cared for by Anthroposophists after the Second
World War.2®

The campaign for organic farming was too much for Bormann to
swallow. He had been investigating the Steiner groups before Hess’s
flight to Scotland. By March 1942, he had persuaded Hitler to demote
Darré formally as Minister in favour of Herbert Backe.?? It is surprising
that Darr& had lasted as long as he had, and this was partly due to
Hitler’s notorious reluctance to be seen to discard Ministers. Darre
regarded Hitler’s conduct of the war as bound to lead to defeat, and
said so. He continued to complain that Hitler had ‘betrayed Blood and
Soil ideas’, His dream of a Jeffersonian republic of small farmers
seemed to belong to another era.

One keen organic farmer, Rolf Gardiner, had visited Darré in
Goslar before the war. He owned an estate in Dorset which he wanted
to make into a centre for rural revival. In 1940, he broadcast on the
BBC, describing his previous admiration for Darré and-his ideas, and
attacking the use made of them by the NSDAP.?° He contacted Darré
in 1951, and told him that the development of the English organic
farming movement had been due to his inspiration. According to
Gardiner, a group of like-minded people had met at the beginning of
the war to found the ‘Kinship for Husbandry’ movement which had a
cross-membership with the ‘Soil Association’, started at about the same
time, and the most influential organic farming group in Britain.’
Others have referred to the same group and its meetings in 1939-40,
and several members seem to have been pro-Darré, although not pro-
Nazi; so this statement may well be true. The English sympathisers also
had experimental organic farms. Gardiner, incidentally, tried to start a
‘Rural University’ on his estate, which later became a trust for organic
farming and reafforestation. John Stewart Collis, author of The Worm
Forgives the Plough, worked there during.the Second World War.3?

Demeter was revived after the war, despite the disappearance of

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Marienhöhe into Russian-held territory. Today it is a symbol-of quality
for health-food products, and the movement has branches in America
and Australia. Sometime after the East German revolt of 1951,
Bartsch’s son wrote to Darr£ that ‘the spirit of Marenhöhe still lives and
breathes’.?? These words, perhaps intended as comfort, were prophetic.

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CHAPTER NINE

Catharsis

It is some indication of Darré’s continuing importance in the general
public eye that his dismissal of 1942 was kept as secret as possible: A
brief statement was issued explaining that he had temporarily left office

due to illness. Backe refused to accept the title of minister until 1944,

and retained his title as leader of the ministry. ‘He is the most suitable
person, despite all his faults of character, admitted Darré. Interestingly,
the dismissal was mentioned by the BBC German language service,
who broadcast a version of events highly favourable to Backe, and
stressing Darré’s reputation as a useless dreamer, and Backe’s as a
practical man. It seems obvious on reading it that detailed gossip about
events in the Berlin ministries was available to the writers.1

The excuse of illness was widely accepted. Darré’s health had in fact
been poor since 1937. He suffered from asthma, eczema, the liver
trouble that would eventually kill him, and all the ills of the
chronically politically frustrated. Already by 1939 he had found himself
alienated from the world around him, even to the extent of shrinking
from entering a bar or café. Eyewitnesses describe how where Goering’s
appearances at Goslar would attract warm applause, and-afterwards he
would sit drinking with his supporters, Darré would create a circle of
withdrawal, so that the party spirit would appear only after his
departure. He was by now a hyper-sensitive, shrinking man,
maintaining his self-image only through sporadic fits of rage and
aggression, and even, quite unrealistically, contemplating joining up in
1940, to ‘escape mechanical coercion, the appointment book,
everything that ties me to the office by the ankle’, to ‘recreate the
spiritual Western Front against capitalism’. He added in his diary, ‘I
have become unsuitable for a normal life of civilian orderliness ...
Organically, I feel healthy, but somehow used up’.?

After his house- in Dahlem-Berlin was bombed, he moved with his
wife and daughter to a chalet on the Schorfheide, a nature reserve
outside Berlin, but was allowed to retain a small office in Berlin until
1944. He called it his Chancellery, and from it he continued to
correspond with other ministers. Sometimes ministerial matters were

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referred to him in error; and this could gum up the works quite badly,
as papers landing on his desk simply remained in an ever-increasing
geological stratification. Occasionally, staff from the Ministry of
Agriculture would descend on him to try to clarify some paper work;
an occasion of mutual dread.?

This period between his dismissal and the end of the war was the
saddest of his life. After 1945, he recounted how rumours were spread
that he was mad. “It is a much greater torture to be persecuted and
despised by one’s own compatriots than it is to live in the prisons and
concentration camps of the victorious enemy ... ‘First of all I was
considered an idealist, then a romantic, then a rebel, then a defeatist,

and last of all a fool.’* His diary largely consisted of vituperative _

rantings between 1942 and 1944, and this section was destroyed in toto
by his wife in 1970, because she felt it showed Darré in such a bad
light. He had joined the great army of the non-men again. As in 1919
and 1926 there was no place for him; this exile was infmitely worse.
With all authority lost, his Cassandra warnings went unheeded. The
war went as badly as he had predicted, and his reaction to meeting
Backe in an air-raid shelter in April 1945 in Berlin was to tell him that
he was now justified in his opposition to the war."

Darré gave himself up to the Allies in Thuringia on 14th April,
1945, and was sent to Spa in Belgium, where he wrote a report on the
food situation. He seems to have envisaged the Allies appointing him
as an interim food minister, and offered many suggestions about the
role of the RNS and food production. His first reaction to his

imprisonment seems to have been that he could at last be revenged

upon his enemies in the Third Reich, and he was eager to co-operate.
During 1946 and 1947, he wrote accounts of his activities for his
captors and a history of the Agricultural Department from 1930 to
1933. He wrote a short book called The Stage Management of the Third
Reich (Drehbühne), which he hoped to publish to help keep his family,
who were now being cared for by other members of the family and
friends. Hans Kehrl recounts that he shared a cell with him for a while,
and described his lively charm of conversation and manner, his
infectious enthusiasm for ideas. Another interesting sidelight on Darré in
prison comes from the memoirs of a German Jew, Erwin Goldmann,
who shared a cell with Darré for a few days, and described him as pro-
British and highly regarded by his captors. Goldmann adds that Darré
was sympathetic to Zionism, and had helped to train Jews to go to
Palestine before the war.°®

Gradually, he realised the seriousness of his position. His first

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Catharsis

interrogation, which took place ten days after his capture, revealed a
truthful account of his connections with the NSDAP and his
experience in office, with the exception of the omission of his
membership of the DVFP in 1923, something that was, as mentioned
earlier, omitted from his application to join the NSDAP.7 The picture
was disbelieved by his interrogator, who decided that Darré had
cobbled this story together in the ten days since his capture. While he
was later to be disingenuous about the racial element in Blood and Soil
fundamentals, arguing that it was irrelevant in practice, he was in
general a truthful witness. He irritated the interrogators by denying
knowledge of sinister wartime activities. The judgment of his
evaluating officer in 1947 was that he was unreliable and untruthful, a
judgment that would have been more convincing if he had been able
to spell Darré’s name correctly, and if any arguments had been
advanced for the judgment.3

What does emerge clearly from all his interrogations is the
ignorance of the American interrogators of the structure and
functioning of the Third Reich. The whole process seems to have been
motivated by a vengeful incompetence, in part fuelled by the salacious
hate-propaganda of the American Press. Even as late as 1946, the mass
suicide of Russians who had fought for Germany and were to be
repatriated back to Russia, was headlined by the USA Army paper
Stars and Stripes as ‘Red Traitors Dachau Suicide Described As
Inhuman Orgy’.? Darré found his hereditary farms described as
‘Teutonic Breeding Centres’.1° He was assumed to have a detailed
knowledge of events in the incorporated areas up to 1945, and even
when his argument that he had not held governmental authority there
after 1939 was accepted, he was pressed for months in 1947 for
information about others. His life of guile, manoeuvre, and intrigue,
his efforts to cope with hostile Nazi ministers now stood him in good
stead, as he was able to counter the threats and blackmail of the
interrogators with his old mixture of quibbles about competence,
dumb insolence and bored persistence. He also suffered less of a shock
from the discovery that he was seen as a war criminal than did many
civil servants and soldiers, because he was accustomed to being
regarded as an enemy.

The ignorance’ of the interrogators about Darré’s activities was
perhaps surprising. They had had a mass of captured documents to
show them something of the detailed workings of the Third Reich and
the conflicts of authority. Of course, the early information had never
been unbiased. Of the very nature of things, little first-hand

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information could be available to them until 1945, only such
intelligence as they could acquire in wartime through refugees and
spies. There was plenty of rumour, and the stale coffee-house gossip of
capital cities at war. But it is surprising that the Hereditary Farm Law,
copies of which abounded, and which was brief and clear enough, was
interpreted as a means of stealing land from Polish farmers in
Germany, part of the war-time Germanising concept. Darré’s lack of
real power after 1939 must have become known to the Allies from
their captured documents, and indeed, the BBC broadcast referred to
earlier had obviously been based on some genuine and personal
knowledge.!! Eventually, Darré became unhelpful to the Allies. Unlike
many stauncher Nazis he refused to give evidence against others. His

affidavit on the SS for the SS Trial in 1949 (Case 8) was remarkably `

candid about his racial aims, his decision to use the ‘Jewish phenotype’
as a negative to make the Germans more racially aware; but refused to
enter into speculation about later SS activities, or accuse others.'? This
took some strength of character, after four years of imprisonment and
threats of prosecution. Darré’s name was ‘among those canvassed for
inclusion in the Nuremberg Trials, but it duplicated other, even
stronger candidates for inclusion’,3 and he was not prosecuted as a
major war criminal in the 1946 Nuremberg trial, held under the joint
auspices of America, Russia, Britain and France.

But, considering the connotations of Blood and Soil, by now seen
as a justification for genocide, Darré was lucky. He defended himself on
this issue in his interrogations, arguing that other countries, including
America, also had racial theorists, but had not murdered millions; in

other words, that there was no connection between Third Reich‘

practice and racial ideals. He referred specifically to an American writer
tactfully described by the stenographer as ‘G’, presumably Madison
Grant, to the embarrassment of the American questioners. After Darré
had persistently brought up ‘G”s name, the question of Blood and Soil
and mass murder was dropped.!*

However, it was to play an important part at the trial. His 1949
trial took place under the aegis of the American Government, and was
part of what was known as the Wilhelmstrasse, or Ministries Trials,
after the street in Berlin where many of Germany’s national ministries
had been housed. He was tried jointly with twenty-one others,
including civil servant von Weiszacker, Schwerin von Krosigk, ex-
Foreign Minister and Protector of Bohemia, Walter Schellenberg, and
Paul Körner of the Ministry of Economics. They were a varied group in
conviction, experience and activity, including pre-Nazi conservatives,

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Nazi ministers, career civil servants, and Schellenberg, widely regarded
within the SS as its cleverest intellectual, and, after Heydrich, one of
the most dangerous. Some of the judges had doubts about the concept
of a joint trial, and these were raised in a dissenting judgment which
will be given in more detail later.15

The news that he was about to be prosecuted left Darré in a state of
near-suicidal depression. His physical state was poor, he was in and out
of the prison hospital, and he was worried about his family, especially
during the bad winter of 1947, which saw famine in Germany,. and
strikes among the starving labour force. His elder daughter came to
visit him at this time, and described how much his spirits had been
lifted by the presence of his defence lawyer, Dr Hans Merkel. Merkel,
who had been called in 1933 from a thriving legal practice in south
Germany to join the legislative drafting team at the RNS, was a.
superficially dry, sober, calm man, with a deeply imaginative streak.
He found Darré in despair, and managed to inspire him with hope and
determination again, probably, indeed, giving him back the will to
live. Merkel saw Darré as a tragic hero of Shakesperean proportions, a
King Lear figure. He persuaded him that there was one more chance
to justify himself to ‘the grandchildren of today’s peasants’ (as Darré had
written in 1939) and to defend his old beliefs and actions.1® The result
was a defence that was remarkably blunt and uncompromising by
Nuremberg standards. It defended Blood and Soil and the idea of a
peasant Germany in a way that interested the judges, who seemed to
be attracted to some of Darré’s ideas as well as puzzled by them.

The ‘Ministries case’ was the longest of all the Nuremberg trials.
There were eight counts. Some defendants were charged with all,
others with some of the accusations. Count One concerned Crimes
against Peace, and Count Two, the Common Plan and Conspiracy,
charges which worried one judge because of the difficulties of proving
joint conspiracy to wage war, and the juridically novel nature of the
notion of a crime against peace. Since all the Allied powers, including
America, had in their time waged aggressive war, a doctrine was
introduced preventing the German defendants from arguing in their
own defence, “Well, you did it too’. Count Three concerned murder
and ill-treatment of POWs. Count Four, atrocities and offences against
German nationals on political, racial and religious’ grounds, was
quashed at the beginning of the hearing, and Count Two was thrown
out later in the trial. Count Five concerned atrocities and offences
committed against civilian populations and where Darré was involved
was divided into three parts; first, racial policies and Jewish

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Catharsis

extermination, second, compulsory expropriation of Jewish land at

under market value, and third the compulsory expropriation, enserfing
and expulsion of Jewish and Polish farmers in the incorporated areas.
Count Six concerned plunder and spoliation in the occupied territories,
which in Darré’s case meant Poland. Count Seven was the slave labour
charge, and Count Eight alleged membership in criminal organisations.
The judgment of the International Military Tribunal was introduced as
prima facie evidence that certain crimes and conspiracies had occurred,
and the defence was not permitted to query these findings (e.g., that
membership in the Reichsleitung, the National Leadership Corps, was a
crime).!7

Compared with the trials carried out in the heated: atmosphere of,

1945-6, the American-run Ministries case was carried out in a more
scrupulous and legal manner. The charges were carefully examined,
and as mentioned earlier, two were rejected as having no legal
foundation. A dissenting judgment on the judicial status of conspiracy
charges and individual responsibility came from Judge Leon Powers,
something that would have been unimaginable in the International
Military Tribunal (IMT) trial, although it was not read in open
Court.!8 The conduct of the trial did present other problems. Men
with varied careers and governmental wartime responsibilities were
being tried together. Much of the translation was carried out hastily
and faultily. Prosecution documents were not made available to the
defence until they were read out in court, and often not then. There
was little care takem to check the authenticity of the documents. Use of

a document in the IMT was assumed to prove its authenticity.

Prosecution witnesses did not have to submit to cross-examination
from the defence. +°

Some of the allegations against Darré look bizarre today. For
example, much was made of the autarkic nature of the National Food
Estate Marketing Law. It was claimed that from 1933 it was a means
of preparing for an aggressive war. Such actions as preparing ration
books and stockpiling food were alleged to be criminal preparations
for a war of aggression, although Britain, certainly, had been
contemplating rationing schemes since 1936, on the recommendation of
a Parliamentary Committee, and produced ration documents before
the Second World War.?° Charges of plunder and spoliation in
Poland, Count Six, omitted to mention that much of the food
imported from Poland was re-exported to other areas, such as Austria,
Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Norway and France. Food was also exported
to Poland. An odd impression was given by this omission. There was

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Catharsis

more food available in Poland during the war than in west Germany’s
industrial areas, and the peasants and the Ukrainian minority,
especially, did well.2! German administrators in Poland had found a
countryside grossly impoverished by their own standards, where the
most basic agricultural infrastructural requirements had to be imported
from Germany. The idea that Polish factories were solemnly
dismantled from these rural areas where peasants were so poor that
they had only mud floors and gaping windows was widely regarded in
post-war Germany as a fantasy, presumably inspired by the Russian
and Allied dismantling of German factories, railways and scientific
equipment that took place between 1945 and 1949.22 Reference in the
trial judgment to the German ‘pretence of payment’ must have rung
wryly on German ears, since no such pretence was being made by the
Allies after the war.

In the judgment of 11th-13th April, 1949, Darré was acquitted of
Count One, crimes against peace, on the grounds that ‘he did not
attend Hitler’s conference where plans of aggression were disclosed’,
and his one letter to Goering which discusses his plans to resettle ethnic
Germans in the east did not provide evidence that he knew there
would be an aggressive war. Charge Two was thrown out generally.
He was found not guilty on part of Count Five, the charge of anti-
semitism leading to Jewish extermination, but his attack on ‘Jews and
democracy” was singled out for comment. The tribunal argued, ‘Darré’s
speeches attack Jews and democracy, but he also attacks the Prussians
and Prussianism ... Except in an authoritarian state, it has not yet been
suggested that to hold such views is criminal’,23 He déscribed Darré’s
reference to ‘Prussians, Jews and Jewish ideas’ in his anti-semitic
speeches as ‘window-dressing’. The implication seems to be that to ban
criticisms of ‘Jews and democracy’ might lead to a ban on attacks on
Prussians and Prussianism, which would never do.?4

Darré had not played down his anti-semitic statements, but put
them in context as political weapons used to defend and further his
own position in the 1930s, and stressed his lack of anti-semitism in his
two books, published before he joined the Nazi Party. Perhaps the
Jeffersonian tone of the ideal of a self-sufficient, racially homogeneous
yeoman peasantry came over. Certainly, Darré received a surprisingly
sympathetic hearing. ‘Some of his ideas were novel and somewhat
bizarre, but it is not a crime to evolve and advocate new or even
unsound social and economic theories’?5 a judgment that gives some
indication of how persuasive Merkel’s arguments had been. To allow
such autonomy to ideas previously presented as intrinsic to Nazi

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Catharsis

ideology displays a considerable shift of opinion from the
interrogations of 1945. ,

The compulsory purchase of Jewish-owned farmland at settlement
valuations was, however, a clear breach of all accepted legal principles,
and Darré was rightly found guilty, although the additional argument
that the theoretical difference between the speculative value of the land
and its settlement value somehow helped pay for Germany’s war
effort, remains unproven.?®

Darré was found guilty of ‘callousness but not of criminality’ ‘in
overseeing the different rations made available to different sections of
the population in Germany. The trial concerned itself specifically with
Jewish rations, but there were multiple gradations concerning different

categories of worker, age group and nationality, not to think of `

POWs, labour levies, voluntary workers.27 The most important
finding in Count Five was that Darré was guilty of expropriating and
reducing to serfdom hundreds of thousands of Polish and Jewish
farmers in the course of the ethnic German resettlement, as recounted
briefly in chapter Six. The court found that Darré’s differences with
Himmler were the result of power struggles, not of ideology, and
referred in this connection to Darré’s letter to Lammers, where he
claimed to be better prepared for settlement projects than Himmler’s
SS men.2® But the loss of factual authority does not seem to have been
sufficiently taken into consideration. The actual letter shows that Darré
thought the SS would not understand the special needs of peasant
farmers, and he argued that the RNS had overseen internal German
peasant settlement since 1939. However, the court interpreted the letter

to mean that Darré had been specifically preparing for the Polish

resettlement, and it was a major factor in his being found guilty.
Despite this confusion, it is obvious from Darré’s early works that he
did support the aim of German settlement in the Baltic and in former
German territories, although intra-German settlement was his main
theme. One is bound to ask, would Darré have overseen the resettlement
of the incorporated areas if he had had the authority to do so, or
would he have refused because it was inhumane. Surely the latter
course would have been most improbable. Nonetheless, one must refer
also to his strictures against von Gottberg’s actions in Czechoslovakia
in 1938, quoted earlier. Clearly, humanitarian considerations were part
of his viewpoint in this matter, if only because he was sensitive to
Germany’s need for a favourable world opinion. One defence of Darré
would be that the Poles had brought it on themselves by dispossessing
700,000 German farmers in the 1920s from the borderlands, but any

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Catharsis

such point was disbarred from the tribunal, and would in any case
make no legal sense. Possession, force and conquest are, and must
always be, uneasy bedfellows with international principles. My own
conclusion is that the finding of guilty made moral sense, even if legal
nonsense, as Darré had no authority in the matter.2°

_ The questiori of Darré’s degree of anti-semitism in the 1930s is a
complex one, and deserves fuller discussion. His circle of Nordic

racialists had not been noted for anti-semitism, although Lehmann, his

publisher, certainly saw Jews as hostile to the Nordic movement. The

author of a monograph on Giinther comments that while National

Socialism was unthinkable without anti-semitism, anti-semitism was

not a valid criterion for Nordic thought.?0 Darre’s first two books

which upheld the Nordic idea as a positive racial ideal, did not

mention Jews, except in two footnotes in Das Bauerntum, where he

praised Jewish racial pride. There was a distinct change of content and

emphasis on this issue in his articles and speeches between 1929 and

1936, and while sincerity and opportunism are entangled in his work,

especially once he became a Minister, it does seem that Darré moved

from a position of disinterest in ‘the Jewish question’ to stressing it

between 1931-5, to disinterest again when his political position

weakened.

In 1926, Darré had written in praise of Rathenau’s racial theories
and opposition to democracy, complaining that the Nordicists had no
idea what ‘the Jew Rathenau’ really believed about the Nordic race
and the value of breeding, an exercise which clearly meant to tease
respectable Jewish non-racialist democrats as much a$ it meant to
provoke the Nordic movement; and two years later he defended
himself against attacks by völkisch opponents by quoting seven more
pages of Rathenau.?! In 1928-9, he criticised all Semitic peoples
together with Tartars and other nomadic tribes, for their nomadic
spirit. He analysed nomads and peasants in terms of a genetically
transmitted mechanism for cultural distinctions.32 In Neuadel he
plagiarised Giinther: ‘The real core of Jewry has pure blood, although
one cannot talk of the Jews as a separate race in the sense in which
racial theory is understood’. Jewish and Polish minorities in the Ruhr
were cited in Neuadel as examples of non-assimilated Germans. ‘It is
not always necessary to think of “Jews from the east”; the Polish
islands in the industrial part of Westphalia, for example, are also
strange to us.’>> Here Darré was directing his arguments to anti-semitic
readers, and trying to broaden their attention. Was Darré engaging in
self-censorship in avoiding anti-semitic tirades in these works? This

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seems unlikely, as Lehmann published many anti-semitic works, and
would have welcomed such attacks from Darré.

In his two books, the Jews are not presented as a racial danger or
physical threat. After he joined the NSDAP, the cultural-racial
dichotomy of nomads versus peasants focused on the Jews as a typical
urban and capitalist minority group, Darré subsuming nomadism with
capitalism. This dichotomy was used to emphasise the supposedly non-
mercantile nature of the rural German. But how could a cultural
feature, such as the inherent dislike of urban life by true Germans, be
transmitted genetically? He suggested that while there was as yet no
scientific explanation for this peculiarity, it probably lay in the different

ways nervous systems reacted to the environment. He argued that Jews,

liked urban life, and that their breeding rate remained as high in towns
as in the country, which proved they were natural city dwellers.
Following up his theory, Darré examined different behaviour patterns
between domestic rats and wild rats. He claimed that domestic rats
were affected unfavourably by the environment, and ceased to breed,
while wild rats were unaffected, and continued to breed, and for that
reason, wild rats were used for experiments by scientists. There had to
be a genetic mechanism at work which controlled this group
behaviour. While there is clearly a pejorative element lurking behind
Darré’s identification of Jews with urbanisation, it is not rendered
programmatic.?*
Similarly, Darré in 1927, in the colourfully titled ‘Pig as Criterion
regarding the Nordic and Semitic Peoples’ [DE, 3, 1927] used a real
cultural distinction—dietary differences between different peoples—and

rational argument to reach his suggested conclusion. He rejected

climate as a cause, and suggested that religious prohibitions were effects
not causes. The reason Semites hated pork and Nordic peasants loved
it, was that the pig was a symbol of the settled way of life. They were
hard to rear by nomads, and thus disliked, and this dislike gradually
became a dietary prohibition to symbolise an anti-agricultural attitude.
Interestingly enough, a similar argument, obviously arrived at quite
spontaneously, is used in a recent work on the history of food, where
the author gives the same reason for dietary prohibition of pork
among Semites: she argues that the dislike of pigs was borrowed from
nomadic Nordic tribes, who themselves dislikes pigs because they
abhorred agriculture. Darré included Tartars, Arabs and other eastern
peoples in his nomad category, not singling out Jews for special attack.

The lack of anti-semitism in Darré’s two major works attracted
unfavourable comment from Hitler in 1930, comment which was

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Ben En

Catharsis

passed on to Darr& when he was angling for a meeting with him, as
described in chapter Four.

A.H. has been falsely informed over my Bauerntum insofar as he
believed that I didn’t sufficiently interpret the Jewish problem in
terms of their parasitical essence. Briefly and clearly, you can
see from these few indications how things stand.

At first sight, this seems straightforward enough. Hitler thought he was
soft on the Jews, but Darré, in describing this criticism, takes care to
describe them as parasites, so clearly he is not soft on the Jews. But
after all, Darré had certainly not sufficiently ‘interpreted the Jewish
problem’ in his books. Read in the context of the conspiratorial
correspondence with Kenstler, it may be that Darré was preparing for
the public shift in attitudes which would enable him to join the Nazi
Party in specifically repudiating the allegation that he failed to make
the Jews the essential core of the world’s problems.

From 1931, he associated ‘Jewry’ with rootless, urban capitalism,
which he defined as a system of exploitation and plunder, deriving
from the landless nature of nomadic tribes, and their habit of.
conquering and plundering others. In an attack on Damaschke, he
alleged that the Land Reform movement was Jewish-inspired, and
represented the re-emergence of the old antipathy between peasant and
nomad. Land Reform was inspired by Ricardo, a Jew. Ricardo’s
theory of rent attacked land ownership, and was taken up by anti-
peasant Jews and pacifists. Nineteenth-century land’. reform was
collectivist, and called for land nationalisation, ‘the typical nomad
dream, drones who would live off the produce of the man of the soil-
parasitical’.9© Of course, the attack on land nationalisation was not
made from a property rights standpoint, and his own proposals
assumed strong collectivist measures. But he differentiated his own
socialism from ‘Jewish socialism’ by claiming that his was racialist,
benevolent and patriotic, while Damaschke was inspired by a
malevolent hostility to the Nordic peasant, and a desire to infiltrate
right-thinking groups. This attack was clearly opportunistic, in that
Damiaschke, while inspired by Henry George, was a co-founder with
Naumann of the 'Nationalsozialer Verein. In many ways, he was a
typical social reformer, teetotaller, völkisch figure of the period, and is
described by one historian as anti-semitic.?7

In late 1934, Darr& wrote of the ‘counter-concept of Jewish

nomadism’. He ascribed the peasant wars of 1525 to ‘the eternal

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ssentative of all international finance capital, the Jews’. International
y attacked old peasant freedoms.. The Jew was both nomad and
‘rt. Profit was inherently opposed to the peasant ideal.”® The
antry was presented as an anti-mercantilist bastion during this
od up to 1935: Darré’s circulars to the National Peasant Council, a
, of high party dignitaries, usually contained anti-semitic
ments. They served to stress his absolute soundness on this key
, while enabling him to present the peasantry as the Stand most
thy of Hitler’s support. By 1936, Darré was enunciating classical
piracy theories.??

If course, like other Nazi ministers, Darr& was subject to pressure

ı below, both from the peasantry and from the Nazi activists,

, in 1934-5, complained that Jewish traders could join the RNS,
operate in German agriculture.*° None the less, pressures against
; as a racial group, as opposed to the idea of a Jew as representing
opular market forces, were weak in rural areas.*! Although the
sh cattle dealer was a stock target for anti-semitic peasant attacks
1 1880 on, in practice peasants sometimes protected Jews from Nazi
‘ks. As late as 1940, it was only under strong pressure from
enbrunner (later head of the RSHA after Heydrich’s assassination)
Jewish-owned land was finally bought-out compulsorily.
respondence between Backe, the then minister, and local officials,
ws the programme’s unpopularity, while there was massive foot-
sging by officials in formerly Austrian areas. 4?
Darré’s circular to his staff tried to clarify the confused legal
ation on the employment of Jews within agriculture after the
remberg Laws of 1935.43 But he called specifically for anti-semitic
cotts to cease, while calling for placards to be placed in town
res proclaiming, ‘Race is the key to world history’.** This was
re provocative than it seemed. He was arguing that hostility to Jews
; not only inhumane, but encouraged a materialistic, envious
‘ude among the perpetrators, based on an inferiority complex, not
a racially positive ideal. Not only was this playing with fire in the
osphere of the time, but the words suggested were even more
gerous, as they were the well-known quotation from Disraeli’s
ringsby.
The picture that emerges from the contemporary documents is
ainly not that Darré was in any way pro-Jewish, but that he did not
nt his own pro-Nordic programme to be absorbed by an emphasis
negative anti-semitism. He encouraged “positive racial education by
lishing pictures of healthy young gymnasts. In 1934, embarrassment

es g reed nat es

Catharsis

arose when a half-Jewish cover girl modelled the cover of Neues Volk.
The girl, a Viennese actress, left for America before the mistake could
be detected.*°

Darr& also supported agricultural training camps for Jews to go to
Palestine, and told local National Food Estate officials not to bother
about Jewish aricestry if it meant that good peasant stock would be
excluded from becoming honorary German farmers under the
Erbhofgesetz.*° So was he a closet anti-semite who came out when it
was safe to do so, or did he adopt a public stance against the Jews to
shield a weak position? He was certainly influenced by friends like
Rosenberg. When Hore-Belisha was appointed Minister of Defence in
Britain, Darré wrote in his diary, ‘Now England is a Jewish instrument
of war’. He forwarded an article published in a French journal to
Hitler which discussed Hore-Belisha’s allegedly Moroccan Jewish
parentage. The diary entry would hardly been part of a public stance.47

On the other hand, Darré was not perceived by others as having
persecutory feelings towards Jews. The Hereditary Farm Law, while it
excluded Jews from the role of honorary German peasant, did not itself
interfere with specifically Jewish land ownership. Perhaps his private
outbursts represented a generalised and endemic anti-semitism of the
time, rather than an accord with the inner circle of Nazi anti-semites.

Darré was also found guilty of plunder and spoliation in Poland,
although here, too, his lack of real authority at the time should have
been taken into account, since this lack was not seriously disputed by
the tribunal. But his successor, Backe, was no longer there to try, and
public opinion demanded a victim. Bearing in mind the sufferings of
the victorious powers, this was not surprising. The Russian
government, in particular, needed a scapegoat to blame for the
miserable condition of Poland, now undergoing an undeclared and
secret civil war, and the hunger and spoliation of the eastern
borderlands, largely caused by Russian looting and atrocities. In this
charge, as in many Nuremberg allegations, one seems to see a mirror
image of many ofthe post-war problems.*®

The last serious charge was that of using slave labour for
agriculture. Darré was found not guilty, on the interesting grounds
that ‘it does not appear that at that time (1940) there was any demand
for forcible recruitment by the agricultural authorities, nor that any
action’ was taken by the General Council of the Four Year Plan for
such forcible recruitment’, and that there was no satisfactory proof that
Darr ‘ever suggested forcible recruitment’.49 This was an

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Catharsis

understatement, indeed, since he had vehemently argued against such
recruitment.

Darr& was cleared of Count Eight, I, of being a member of a
criminal organisation, the SS. In view of the fact that he had been
intimately involved with the SS between 1931 and 1938, as well as
being a member, this may seem surprising. However, the fact that he
had attempted to resign in 1938, and had been kept on the rolls against
his will, and that he had resigned his office in the Race and Settlement
Chief Office, was taken into consideration. The judgment seems to
imply that the SS was not a criminal organisation before 1938. He was
found guilty of being a member of the National Leadership Corps.5°

The sentence was seven years, and consideration was given to the .

four years already spent in jail. Darré was fortunate not to have been
tried in 1946 along with Streicher, Ley, Goering and other leaders. His
sentence was lenient, especially since he did not benefit from the
growing realisation of the true nature of the Russians by the other
Allies, as did the Wehrmacht officers and industrialists.

Certainly, Darré was lucky to be found not guilty of charges of
anti-semitism, but unlucky to be found guilty of dispossessing Polish
farmers. Both were really miscarriages of justice. Assuming anti-semitic
statement to be a crime, he was guilty.

Between 1947 and his death in 1953, Darré received hundreds of letters
addressed to him as ‘Herr Minister’, or ‘Dear and Honoured Minister’.
Indeed, one acquaintance commented that imprisonment was in a sense

a boon to him, as it restored his lost status. As far as the Allies, too, 7

were concerned, he was once again the Minister.

This support from outside also helped to lift his morale, and was
the culmination of a long process of returning mental health. Bad as
the post-war period was, it was the awakening from a bad dream for
him. Now, gradually, a world of normality returned, precisely because
the catastrophe he feared had occurred. A beaten Germany lay starving
and dismembered, with millions of refugees homeless. His own
dependents, like many others, were penniless, but at least matters could
not become worse.

Darré was freed on appeal, largely on the grounds of ill-health, and
because he had spent a total of five and a half years in prison already,
after a hearing in Munich, August 1950. He was one of several
convicted Nazis released that year, including Otto ‘Press’ Dietrich, and
Flick, the industrialist. In order to qualify for release, the prisoners had
to have been given fixed term sentences, not life, and to have served a

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Catharsis

certain proportion of them, roughly one third, with good behaviour.
The releases caused fierce criticism in the New York Times.
‘Democratically minded men and women’ might, it was feared, turn
against the Americans because of: their leniency. Fortunately, America
managed to survive this threat. English papers noted worriedly that
delegations of East German trade unions (possibly the democratically
minded men and women mentioned by the New York Times) also
opposed the releases.5!

He was released in October, and went to stay with his former in-laws
near Stuttgart, where he walked in the countryside, and reflected on

"his experiences. His letters express a more fervent love of the German

countryside than he had ever before articulated. His first action was to
write to Merkel, thanking him for all his efforts on his behalf.5?

In Stuttgart, he met an organic farmer, a meeting arranged by the
former secretary to the Anthroposophist Society, and explained his
plans to start a German version of the English ‘Soil Association’, the
group, still in vigorous existence, which Lady Eve Balfour had started
in 1941. A publisher had offered him a study to work in Goslar, and
he accepted the offer gratefully, feeling that this renewed link with

‚Goslar, where his mother was buried, and where he met his first wife,

must be fated. He planned to settle in Bad Harzburg, a spa town near
Goslar, and live on his earnings from journalism. ‘In any case, I have
the feeling that, although things look bad in material terms, there is
some hope’, he wrote, comparing 1950 to the dark days of 1930. The
irony of such a comparison, in view of what happened during the later
1930s, seemed lost on him.54

In fact, although bombarded with Steinerite material while in
prison, Darré never became fully converted to any of these ideas. His
peasant ideology lacked that degree of utopian fervour: it was based,
rather, on Darré’s vision of the most sensible,. practical and fulfilled way
to live. He followed T.H. Huxley’s view on the essentially artificial
nature of civilisation; man had become a domesticated animal, and
needed careful cultivation to maintain a viable society. This entailed
not only eugenic and intra-racial ideas (German peasants being deemed
to be German: already) but environmentalist improvements in infant
nutrition, gymnastics and fresh air for the young, and other pro-
natalist, neo-Lamarckian ideas. Shortly before his death, Darré wrote to
a young follower of Steiner who proposed to farm a smallholding on
organic lines. He began by encouraging the general aim, which he saw
as a pioneering goal comparable to nineteenth century settlement

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Satharsis

broad. He went on to disassociate himself, kindly, from the more
xtreme views on ‘biological-dynamic’. farming, then argued that over
he centuries man had suffered the loss of two kinds of relationship:
the relationship to the organic strength of the soil and earth, and
econdly the relationship to God, who lives and works in everything in
his world’. Prior to the appearance of ‘materialistic philosophy’, the
yeasant had been the link between man and God. This holistic trinity,
yeasant-nature-God, was the only way for man to fulfil himself. Darré
dded that he had been a fool to think that the Nazis were the ones
vho could repair this link.54

Rolf Gardiner resumed contact, writing first to an ex-member of

he RNS. Several letters were exchanged between him and Darré, and .

orian Jenks, ex-agricultural adviser to the BUF and proponent of
mallholdings, probably on Gardiner’s request, sent Darré his writings.
3ut Darré was cool. Gardiner’s generous and selfless gesture in offering
riendship to a man who was, after all, a convicted Nazi war criminal,
vas not really appreciated. His attack on the RNS and, to some
xtent, Darré, in his broadcast in 1940, after accepting German
ospitality during the 1930s, had never been forgiven. The radical
Nazis had no idea of the atmosphere in wartime Britain, and the
trength of public opinion.>*

Admiral Horthy who had encountered Darré when the two were
mprisoned at Spa, Belgium, in May 1945, tried to meet him when he
yassed through Berlin, but he was ill in a clinic in Berlin, and unable
o keep the appointment. Thirty years ago, Horthy had distributed

and to his veteran soldiers, and Darré had alluded to this in Neuadel. |

Horthy may have heard of it through the Hungarian veterans who had
-ontacted Darr& in 1930 after the publication of his book.°®

Another move to form a German ‘Soil Association’ was made in
December 1952, when Darré met the Town Clerk (Oberstadtdirektor)
n Goslar at the Hotel Niedersachsischer Hof, and made notes about a
ociety to be called ‘Mensch und Heimat’. Its function would be to
urther ‘organic ideas, a healthy soil and care for the homeland’
Heimatpflege). The society would have to be officially registered and
ncorporated, and much of the discussion turned on how this was to be
Jone. Darré could find financial support from his brother-in-law, and
egal backing from the ex-RNS lawyers, possibly Merkel, but was
serturbed about his own involvement. ‘How to avoid the accusation of
yeing a ‘‘naziistische” organisation, while retaining some influence,” he
otted.57 During the years after his release, he wrote steadily, articles
with titles like ‘The Living Soil’, ‘Peasant and Technology’, and

196

Catharsis

‘Mother Earth’. The articles on organic farming were usually inspired
by English works, such as those by Sir Albert Howard, Sir George
Stapledon, and Lady Eve Balfour, although .he also referred to the
USA’s ‘Friends of the Soil’, and American efforts to combat erosion. In -
1953, he enthusiastically reviewed Lady Eve Balfour’s The Living Soil.
As in the 1930s, he wrote on the American dust bowl, this time under
the pseudonym of Carl Carlsson, and called for Germany to adopt soil
protection measures of a similar kind to America’s 1947 anti-erosion
law, in the local press, and in a journal published by an old
Witzenhausen friend, in South America.

His articles attacked large corporations for ignoring the possibilities
of new technology which could help the farmer. He opposed |
exploitative attitudes to the land, factory farming, and an ‘agricultural
division of labour’, all caused, in his view, by contemporary
technology. He especially criticised industry and government for their
obsession with the virtues of large-scale farming, and demanded
encouragement for machines which would help the peasant farmer. As
in the 1930s, though, he hailed the development of the small, petrol-
driven tractor and machinery useful for market-gardening. He
energetically propounded the virtues of methane gas plants for small
farms; such plants could produce energy from composted dung and
other waste materials. ,

By the summer of 1953, Darré was too ill to continue. An appeal was
launched to pay for his medical care, and among those contributing
were political enemies who none the less respected Darré’s.commitment
to the agrarian sector, men like the head of the Bavarian Farmer’s
Union, who ‘insisted on paying something out of his own pocket. He
went into a clinic in the Leopoldstrasse, in Munich, helped by his
sister-in-law and long-term close friend, Karen von Billabeck. He was
soon unable to write, and scribbled an apologetic last note to his first
wife, Alma. There he died on the 6th September 1953 from liver
failure exacerbated by jaundice. His death was marked by some
guarded obituaries in Germany, but aroused little interest.5®

During the war, Darré liked to walk on the Steinberg, a mountain
overlooking Goslar, where there was a peasant leaders’ school.
Attendance here for a year was compulsory, and they owned a field,
where Darr& planned after the war to build a centre for farmer’s wives
and their children, with a creche, a library and sports facilities. The
field in Goslar now boasts exactly such a building, erected in the early
1960s by the local farmer’s union, and looked after by a former peasant

197

Catharsis

leader, but it holds no reference to Darré, and any trace of Darré and the
National Peasant City have long since disappeared from Goslar. The
hotel, Der Achtermann, where the mediaeval basement was used for
RNS allies, was closed for decades, and only recently opened, now
under new ownership, and with largely Turkish staff. The town itself
found its population doubled by refugees from Thuringia, in the
Russian zone, and refugees from Poland. It is hardly surprising that
Goslar’s monument to Blood and Soil, with its wheat sheaves, its Odal
rune and the swastika, was dismantled; perhaps unsurprising that after
Darré’s death, the Christian Democrat mayor of Goslar, exiled by the
Nazis, tried to prevent his burial in the town cemetery, where he had

long reserved a place next to his mother. It was the Social Democratic ,

Town administrator, who shared Darré’s interest in the organic farming
movement, who insisted that he should have the place. But both men
attended the ‘honorary citizen’s’ funeral, as, according to the local
paper, did hundreds of Goslar citizens. Dr Winter, who had written to
King’s College School, Wimbledon, on Darré’s behalf in 1933, laid a
wreath from the German Colonial School at Witzenhausen.>?

The gravestones have long since been removed from the mounds
of earth where the bodies of other members of the National Peasant
Council, based at Goslar, were buried, but Darré’s grave retains its
stone, a large plain slab under whispering pine trees, in the corner of
the secular cemetery where Guderian and other military leaders are
buried. There is no name on the stone, but an allegedly family shield,
bearing a strange resemblance to the Nordic quasi-religious symbols of

the 1920s—enclosing the pagan symbol of eternity, a snake with its tail

in its mouth, carved around a runic S with a bar through it—and the
withered memory of twelve red roses cast on the grave by his sister in
1953. From the stone, it is possible to look up to the Steinberg, where
the Peasant House is just visible.°°

Before 1945, each small town had its ‘Darré-Haus’; now one only is
rumoured still to have the name on the door, in East Germany. Goslar
typified Germany’s attempts to wipe her memory clear after the war.
It took eight hundred years before the old imperial palace was rebuilt
in the nineteenth century: one hopes it will not be so long before the
brief episode of Goslar, the National Peasant City, can be exhumed
again, examined and remembered.

In both of his main points, the need for man to be linked to the soil,
and for the maintenance of the vitalist cycle of soil-growth-decay,
Darré was directly in the tradition of much of today’s ‘Green’ thinking.

Catharsis

In his belief in a peasant international, stretching from England to the
Baltic, he expressed that element of anti-expansionism and anti-
imperialism which characterises writers from Cobbett to Goldsmith
who have propounded the peasant ideal.

lt may be argued that it is impossible to take seriously any ideas
put forward by a minister of the Third Reich. Darré was a racialist;
does this not put his ideas beyond the pale? Can his writings after the
Second World War be taken seriously when it is most unlikely that he
would have been allowed to publish works on the virtues of Nordic
Man? Can his interest in organic farming be anything other than
window dressing for support for a vicious, brutal regime?

Of course, it is unlikely that Darré would have been able to publish
book reviews, even under a pseudonym, propounding the survival of
the Nordic race in 1951. However, as early as 1930, he seems to have
put his Nordicism second to his peasant ideals, and was certainly
criticised by members of the Nordic Ring for doing so. But in any
case, intra-racialism is an intrinsic part of the peasant ideology,
although it is unfashionable to stress this in the west today. The Third
World and ethnic minorities in the west are more openly racialistic.
The idea of a network of kinship is intrinsic to a definition of a
peasant, and must by definition exclude those alien to that network.

‘The ideal peasant farm is oriented towards the long term, the family

and the future of the tribe. ‘Peasantness’ cannot absorb alien cultures,
religions and races, without the risk of self-destruction. Further, in
Darré’s case it is hard to criticise his sincerity, when he constantly put
himself in danger of imprisonment or worse, and saw. many of his
friends and allies arrested for holding his own views, but none the less
persisted with those views.

One returns to the paradox referred to in chapter Eight, that if
National Socialism, as an ideology, had room for Darré’s views, then it
may be that currently accepted categories of early National Socialism
will have to be revised to allow for the sincerity and, indeed, passion,
with which a top Nazi leader held views on the environment, the
ecology and the peasant. If the view is accepted that Darré’s peasant
ideology presented merely morphological and tangential resemblances
to National Socialism, but is an immediate ancestor, in spirit as well as
in detail, to the ecological movement of today, then the implications of
current ecological ideas may have to be examined.

The continuity of his ideas, from the 1930s to the 1950s, is striking.
By the early 1950s, the idea of self-sufficiency in energy and raw
materials had become widely accepted. The Common Agricultural

198 | 199

arsis

cy was to continue price support for small farmers, and to some
nt, protection for smallholders. It was widely perceived among
nan farmers as a continuation of the old controlled marketing
m, and welcomed for the same reasons. German émigrés in England,
John Papworth and F.E. Schumacher, popularised ‘Small is
ıtiful’ ideas in a post-war Britain still dedicated to fashionable
-scale planning. Eventually, the anti-capitalist implications of the
ervationist movement were recognised, and it became politicised.
old organic farming movement, with its innovatory search for
grasses, compost-making methods and self-sufficiency allotments,
ng so much to German vitalist thought of the early decades of this
ury, became swamped in a vaguely ‘alternative’ movement,
itarian, anti-nuclear (illogically, since nuclear power was cleaner,
‘and less wasteful in terms of resources), and messianic. From re-
ing bottles and saving whales, conservationists became associated
| feminism and other forms of exclusivist hysteria. When one is
ıssing the element of continuity in Darré’s ideas, this break in the
s should be borne in mind.

One should, in short, perhaps distinguish between today’s party
tical Greens—Levellers rather than conservationists—whose
criptions are often as unrelated to environmental issues as they are
onian, and the more dedicated organic farmers, whether in
many or England, who pursued an unpopular and often financially
warding path over decades, at a time when their ideas were not at
ashionable. The latter group seem to be dedicated to many of the
e values as Darre and his contemporary ecologist and
hroposophist sympathisers: the Greens bear more resemblance to
e pre- and proto-Nazi groups that sprang up during the 1920s in
yutbreak of quasi-religious prophecy and radicalism. Here there is
n for research. But certainly it is time the contribution Darré and
followers made to twentieth-century ecological thought was
gnised; it is at least arguable that without him the ecological
rement would have perished in his time and place.

Conclusion

Despite the covert nature of his role in joining the NSDAP, Darré was
virtually the sole creator and representative of agrarian theory within it
in the early 1930s, recognised as the master and arbiter of all agrarian

o matters by his peers. His themes were: intensive peasant farming,

localised autarky as a step towards national autarky, defensive and
eugenically-oriented racialism and a defensive racial nationalism. His
profound anti-urbanism was a source of serious and eventually fatal
conflict with the NSDAP, with its strong urban, lower-middle-class
basis; and only his ability to attract peasant support, and his
revolutionary, yet non-Marxist stance, made him palatable to the non-
agrarian Nazis. Many serious agrarian experts and reformers approved
of Darré’s social and racial rationale for supporting the peasantry.
Primarily, however, they saw the peasant movement as the most
sensible and efficient way to develop German agriculture. After Darré’s
fall, his ideas were retained by the middle and lower-level agricultural
administrators, but with more emphasis on their immediately practical
aspects. The populist element in his peasant corporation was also a
powerful driving force for those SS staff concernéd with ethnic
German resettlement during 1940-1.

Between 1933 and 1938, many of the economic aims of National
Socialist agrarian policy were successful. Productivity increased in
nearly all sectors; national self-sufficiency increased, as did intensive
peasant farming: these were all major policy aims. Economic failures
came later, and were a result of the low priority given to agriculture
during the period of war preparations. Later, war itself, and the
misconceptions about possible food production in Eastern Europe, led
to further neglect of German agriculture. The success of agricultural
reform in the 1930s came about despite a multiplicity of overlapping
and conflicting organisations, and the experimental problems of the
marketing organisation. It was largely due to the relentless efforts of
the middle and lower-level echelons of the RNS, together with the
unremitting labour and ingenuity of the German peasant.

Given the limited time-span in which the National Food Estate was

201

Conclusion

effectively operative, and given the conflict between the drive for
higher production and the need to protect farmers from the gluts and
price collapses of earlier years, the achievement of the agricultural
advisers in producing a self-sufficiency level of 81% by 1938 was
considerable. This is especially so since after 1936, artificially high
producer prices - that most potent stimulus—became politically
unacceptable. Wartime food production, too, was maintained as
efficiently as was possible in the circumstances, and without the disasters
of the First World War. That this occurred despite the interference
of Goering, Himmler and the Wehrmacht High Command,
the shortage of foreign reserves, machinery, fertiliser and government
expenditure, is again a tribute to the competence of the RNS and
RMEL administrators—especially since many of the countries occupied by.
Germany during the war were food deficit countries. As the organisation
of food production to cope with blockade and war had been another
policy aim, this too must be counted as a considerable success.

During the war, unrealistic assessment im Berlin of the time,
money, energy, machinery and vast amounts of fertiliser needed to
render derelict and virgin Polish land fertile, was a constant hindrance;
as was the obsessional belief among many top Nazis that free land
existed ‘over the green, green heath’. It became painfully and rapidly
clear to the agricultural advisers and administrators sent to the
Incorporated Areas and places east that such land needed expenditure
on agricultural infrastructure—roads, electrification, transport and
housing. This was without the confusion and expenditure necessitated
by a complete population transfer (as envisaged, if not fully
implemented). Whatever Hitler’s true motives for war, the Second
World War was hopelessly misconceived in terms of food surpluses
and living space, and Darré’s pessimism about its results justified. Here,
as elsewhere, his capacity to take a long-term view was vindicated by
events, despite his reputation for unwordly impracticality. Wartime
Europe did remain a food deficit area, and the RNS could never have
changed that fact in the short term, because of the rogue factor of
Russia. Russian agriculture lay in ruins, its grain-growing area
devastated by collectivisation, well before Operation Barbarossa; it
seems, indeed, to have remained in that condition to this day.

However, the question remains: given a less expansionist régime,
would Darré’s social policies for the peasantry still have been doomed to
failure? Could the hardships inherent then in German peasant life have
been ameliorated sufficiently to stop and reverse the flight from the
land? The improvement of peasant living standards was a pre-requisite

202

Conclusion

to any attempt to select a racial élite from among the peasantry, as
without it, peasants would drift away from the land. Insofar as his
ideas entailed the economic and social protection of the peasantry,
there seems no reason to suppose that these features of his policies were
anything other than viable. Indeed, the increase in small farm
productivity that took place in the 1930s provided the perfect
justification for such protection. But Darré’s inability to distinguish—at
least in his rhetoric—long-term plans from short-term necessities,
hampered progress in areas where progress could have been achieved.
It enabled critics of the rural ideal, in Germany as elsewhere, to dwell
on the peasantry’s supposedly anti-modern, anti-industrial, past-
oriented and defensive tendencies, and to ignore the mounting
evidence that peasant farming was a practical approach to the problems
of securing the national food-supply.

Would a less fundamentalist approach have won concessions from
the régime, or was there a real incompatibility between the demands of
agriculture and the industrial expansion of the 1930s? Certainly, Darré
saw peasant society and urban industrialism as mutually exclusive
categories, and this was inherent in his vision, but was this division
true in real terms? After all, the policy of encouraging increased
peasant production was successful. Increased mechanisation, fertiliser
use and altered product mix was a realistic strategy for the survival of
the small farmer in an industrialised society. Thus far, the small farmer
and the urban world were complementary rather than opposed, where
economic needs were concerned. On the other hand, while the rural
ideal prevalent in the inter-war years was not especially past-oriented,
stressing rather the need to break free of the shackles of a burdensome
and oppressive past, it was certainly defensive. lt envisaged an
economically static society, and this, together with Darré’s doom-laden
scenario of urban decay, the choice of death or a painful survival,
made it impossible for most Nazi politicians to support Darré’s version
of the peasant society. Even his followers, however sympathetic, had
become reluctant to accept this vision by the 1930s, for the apocalyptic
nature of his—and Weimar—prophecies was inappropriate to the spirit
of industrial expansion and technocratic success that ruled Nazi
Germany. In the face of the furious rate of change of German society
and industry in the 1930s, Darré’s society of stasis—an_ essentially
defensive concept, opposed to economic growth—became impossible
to maintain as an ideal, except in the very longest of terms.

However, there. was an alternative inherent in Darré’s vision. This
was the strong, productive, creative peasant, the ‘smallholding

203

usion

cian of the future’. Such a figure could co-exist with industry,
-cted by the strongest possible weapon, the economic power of his
uctive capacity. This was the element of Darré’s ideology that
ved, and indeed, the decision to use price support and subsidy to
ar the peasant rather than the large landowner was a major change
_ previous German policy, and one whose political implications
considerable. Further analysis of these implications is difficult, and
aps redundant, since the loss of the Junker heartlands after 1945
id in any case have rendered this political change inevitable, and
earguard action impossible. 7
‘he political implications of Darré’s policies are more complex.
int populism was a strong factor behind the agrarian legislation of
, and a major impulse in Darré’s support from the peasantry.:
ever, this peasant populism was inherently hostile to large-scale
utions, especially those associated with the modern nation-state.
rianism was symptomised by a republican radicalism opposed to
rchy and supra-tribal organisation. It had no room for a political
m that was not flexible, organic and spontaneous. While agrarian
ical groups were capable of maintaining their bargaining power
in a modern industrialised state (and have done so to this day), the
-of their self-image, the heart of the rural ideal, tended towards
shy, a phenomenon noted during the peasant revolt of 1928-9. All
1al political forms were seen as enemies, a suitable target for
int cunning, and that untrammelled violence typical of their
iced, centuries-old sense of alienation and oppression. Not only
the attempt to create a corporatist-cum-syndicalist structure, the
snahrstand, contradict the spirit of the centralised National Socialist
but as a means of giving the farmer political power, it involved a
ontradiction: peasant populism was inherently anti-state, but
ed state legislation and protection to co-exist with the urban world
urished.
urther, the racialism inherent both in the web of peasant values
Darré’s specific pan-Nordicism was hard to reconcile with nation-
boundaries; peasant tribalism was smaller-scale, while Nordic
lism envisaged a Northern European ‘green’ union, spreading from
and to Finland, in a loosely knit federation. But this had little to
vith the aims of the Nazi Party, which, like most other German
ical parties between 1918 and 1933, was committed to restoring
nan power and territory to (as a minimum) its pre-First World
position. Darré’s lack of interest in this aspect of foreign affairs
ld alone have unfitted him to be a Minister in the Third Reich.

Conclusion

But it perhaps fitted him for a post in any government committed |
to survival and pansion. The internal dynamism of the Third Reich
seemed to leadiexorably to empire, for reasons which are still the
subject of vigous dispute, and which are outside the range of this
work. This impial drive in turn entailed a fully fascist, ‘from above’
power structurewith an essentially non-racialist, but élitist social base,
which crossed tional and racial boundaries in search of allies and
ability. Empire eant a strong central government, playing off some
ethnic and natial groups against others within it. No empire had
ever survived ‘ithout a cross-current of foreign influences, of
exogenous cultal inputs. Darré’s hostility to conservatism and
imperialism wasaused by his assessment of this inevitability, and the
extent to whichvar and expansion would be to the disadvantage of
the peasant; wh, almost alone among Nazi leaders, he realised, and
protested again the racial implications of importing foreign
agricultural laboers, while German peasants were recruited for death
on the Russian int. In practice, Darré was obliged to subordinate his
planned racial se:tion, and the breeding of a peasant élite, to the more
pressing need toreserve the existing peasantry. This subordination of
racial theory to litical practice was characteristic of the Third Reich,

not only in tk areas of peasant settlement and ethnic German

resettlement, wke racial rhetoric gave way to more immediate
imperatives, ancnot only under the exigencies of war; it was
observable throwmout its governmental practice. Even within the SS,
supposedly the hrt of the racial selection process, the practice of mass
co-option of outle advisers and bodies meant that racial selection was
secondary to thereation of an ‘open, yet authoritarian élite’ (Struve)
except at its low levels, where racial selection was used to weed out
the politically unmmitted after 1933. Certainly, the SS élite eventually
became pan-Eurean, losing even its national as well as its racial
character. :

If anything, zriculture displayed less inherent conflict between
achievement-orieation and racial selection than elsewhere in the
Third Reich; ncbecause agrarianism was necessarily more racialist,
but because rac selection of the peasantry was not an essential
Prerequisite of Ni agricultural policy. Peasants, in a.sense, were pre-
selected. The va majority of German peasants were Germanic by
definition and bself-assessment. It was intra-racial selection, Darré’s
plan to breed a w nobility, that rapidly took a back seat after 1933,
and as the peasany continued to decline in numbers, it disappeared as
a policy goal. Thfact that Darré and his old friends among the 1920s

205

Conclusion

littérateurs such as Schultze-Naumburg and the Prince zur Lippe, took
up eugenic plans in conditions of semi-secrecy in 1939 (as part of
Darré’s Society of the Friends of the German Peasantry). demonstrates
the peripheral nature of this plan where government policy was
concerned. The mass importation of foreign agricultural labourers was
the final acknowledgment by the Third Reich that the German
peasant’s role as racial source material was to be abandoned.
But if Darré’s racialism does not of itself create a coincidence with
National Socialism, how is it to be classified? The implications of
treating man as a biological entity had aroused controversy long before
the rise of National Socialism, and the disagreements that emerged had
little to do with the conventional right-left political spectrum. The
belief that mankind was a part of the natural order, and subject to all
the physical laws that emerge from a study of animals, opposed the
idea, linked sometimes with Utopian, sometimes with Idealist or
religious tendencies, that man was unique, and could not be subject to
the same kind of classificatory process as the crested newt; a view
expressed in the 1920s and 1930s not only by liberal and democratic
opponents of the Nazis, but by German neo-conservatives, such as
Spengler, Jung, Jiinger and Moeller. The view that supported racial
typology was held by (among others), left-wing and progressive
writers, such as Carl Vogt (who taught Houston Stewart Chamberlain
at the University of Geneva), it accompanied a belief in scientific
rationalism. Racial categorisation was not unique to National
Socialism, nor was it a right-wing or conservative phenomenon. The
racialist element in agrarian and pro-peasant thought does not
necessarily label it, therefore, as National Socialist.
What is at first sight closer to National Socialist and allied
movements is the ‘naturist’ position, one end of a political axis where
the determinant is the posture taken towards the limits of human
adaptability. Darré was a naturist. He saw man’s need to remain part of
the natural world (natural in style, texture and spirit) as an immutable
datum, dominating but not destroying the potential of the human will.
This immutability of man’s nature was not the immutability of the
unchanging natural order inherent in the conservative position, but the
product of a more radical stance. This radicalism, the mixture of
voluntarism and determinist pessimism, resembles the proto-fascist
movement immediately prior to and post the First World War; such
movements, however, were not involved with agrarian arguments,
which remained Darré’s primary concern, so the resemblance does not
really help to classify the agrarian movement under Darré in the 1920s

206

men

Conclusion

and 1930s. A forceful argument was made by ‘Nolte that the crucial
drive behind National Socialism was the opposition to ‘transcendence’.

He defined this as the belief, common to liberals, Marxists, and most

post-Enlightenment thinkers, that the boundaries and possibilities of
nature could be transcended, that man’s unique abilities gave him the

opportunity of unlimited progress and adaptability. Fascism was an

attack on transcendence, defined by Nietzsche as the great crime

against Western culture, one inherent in its very origins. Darré fits this

antitranscendence definition. But Nolte is surely mistaken in confining

this political axis to National Socialists on the one hand and liberals

plus liberal-derivatives on the other. Naturism versus transcendence is a

division that can be traced far back in European thought; and these

categories do not fit a fascist-anti-fascist definition, nor, again, a right-

left one.

Where the analysis can be applied to National Socialism —bearing
in mind that it in no way applies to Nazi practice—is to the attack on
materialism and exploitative technology made by diverse Nazi writers,
including Hitler. They presented the spirit of exploitation and
maximum utilisation of resources as a crime against nature, usually
capitalist and Jewish inspired. However, the degree of involvement in,
and reliance upon these arguments is a limited and trivial factor in
National Socialist thought, with the exception of Darré, who carried
the mechanophobe argument to its logical conclusion. Darré’s obsession
with the vision of man as a natural animal, his belief that the peasant
was the link between ‘a Holy Trinity of Peasant, soil and God’, had no
room for extraneous inputs, such as loyalty to Hitler, or to the Nazi’s
watering down of the racial ethic to assist a perceived national-cum-
imperial requirement. He combined practical arguments about peasant
production with impractical demands for a revolutionary social
purification, a near-nihilistic rejection of existing institutions, demands
which could not possibly have co-existed. with the NSDAP as it
emerged after 1933.

We are left with the man who created an agrarian policy for the
National Socialists, and brought into the NSDAP a large and
significant section of popular peasant opinion and intellectual support.
His fall left a joint legacy of disaffected farmers and devoted agrarian
reformers, who continued to try to implement what they conceived to
be his aims. After the Second World War, more of Darré’s reformist
ideas were implemented, in the shape of the peasant protection
mechanism enshrined in the Common Market Agricultural Policy. The

Messianic underpinnings of his holistic vision were forgotten, only to

207

conclusion

e-emerge in today’s apocalyptic ecological movement. Ironically, the
ractical implications were also part of.a continuous line of German
grarian development. As elsewhere in the history of the Third Reich,
t is the element of continuity, rather than the discontinuous
evolutionary change, that is most striking.

208

Appendix

10.

MARRIAGE ORDER. OF THE SS, 31.12.31, MUNICH,
PROMULGATED BY HEINRICH HIMMLER

. The SS are a union of Germans of Nordic characteristics, chosen

according to distinct aspects.

. In accordance with the National Socialist conception of things,

aware that the future of our people rests on selection, and of the
hereditary conservation of racially healthy and sound blood, |
hereby introduce the ‘marriage approval’ for all the unmarried
members of the SS, to take effect fully after 1st January 1932.

. The family, hereditarily healthy, and valuable on account of its

German character (in the Nordic sense) is the envisaged purpose.

. Marriage approval will be given or refused solely on grounds of

race or of hereditary health.

. All SS men who intend to marry are obliged to seek the approval

of the Reichsfiihrer of the SS.

. SS members who marry despite their being refused permission are

debarred; they can resign. g

. The decisions on marriage will be made by the racial office of the

SS.

. The racial office will hold the ‘SS family records’. The family of

SS members will be recorded there after notification of marriage
or official acceptance of the request to be recorded.

. The RE SS, the Director of the Racial Office and the relevant

officials of that office are bound by the code of professional
confidence.
The SS are aware of making an important step forwards with this
present order. Jokes, sarcasms and misunderstandings do not affect
us; the future belongs to us. i

signed HH, RF SS

209

Notes on Sources

Much of the Ministry of Agriculture’s file material was destroyed by
bombing during the Second World War, and Darr& and Backe both
lost the bulk of their correspondence in the same way. Luckily, many

of the issues and problems can be reconstructed by using other.

government material, and sifting through the papers of the Finance
Ministry, the Reichschancellery, and the Hitler Adjutant files, etc., for
agricultural material. Darré’s personal papers are divided between the
Goslar City Archives, which has the pre-1933 section, and the Federal
Archives at Coblenz, while his letters to his first wife, Alma, are at the
Institute of Contemporary History, Munich,. They are, however,
restricted, as are Backe’s papers at the Federal Archive, Coblenz.
Backe’s letters to his wife and his documents (passport, references, etc.,)
are on microfilm there, and his personal papers, while not copious,
contain much that is of interest to the intellectual historian.

One source which presented some difficulty was Darré’s diary,
which consists of typed extracts taken from his original diary by two
friends, after the original was bought back from the Federal Archive,
Coblenz by his second wife. She felt that it showed Darré in too bad a
light. The original diary has been read by several historians and
archivists, although it was unfortunately burnt in the late 1960s. After
discussions with the two editors, and with the chief archivist at Goslar,
where it can be read but not photo-copied, it seems clear that the
typed version is perfectly valid. Its contents are often borne out by
material in other private and governmental files, and the material left
in does not seem to have been selected with a view to presenting Darré
in a specially favourable light; for example, the attack on Hore-Belisha
in 1939, and some positive remarks about Hitler. The editors’ claim
that only material of a personal, prolix and libellous nature has been

deleted can, I think, be accepted. One can only regret that so many of

Darré’s scurrilous but sharp comments have gone for ever. However, I
have tried not to base any one aspect of my interpretation on this
document, and, for the same reason, have, wherever possible, avoided

210

Notes on Sources

using defence documents presented at the Nuremberg Trial as a sole

source.

It proved impossible to find a German copy of Neuadel, and I
worked with the French translation of 1939, La Race. Page references
to Neuadel are therefore to the French edition.

All translations, except that on page 64, are by the author.

List of Abbreviations

AD
DAB
DAG

DNVP
DRV

DSB
DVFP

EHG
FKG
Gestapo
G-G
KBF
LBF
NSDAP

OKW
PLRB
RfA
RFM

RJM
RKFDV

RMEL

1. PARTIES AND ORGANISATIONS

Agrarpolitischer Apparat (Agricultural-political organisation)
Deutsche Ansiedlungsbank (German Resettlement Bank)
Deutsche Ansiedlungsgesellschaft (German Resettlement
Society)

Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National People’s
Party)

Deutscher Reichsverein fiir Siedlungspflege (German National
Association for Settlement Welfare)

Deutsche Siedlungsbank (German Settlement Bank)
Deutsche Vélkische Freiheitspartei (German People’s Freedom
Party)

Erbhofgesetz (Hereditary Farm Law)

Fidei-Kommissgesetz (Entailed Estates Law)

Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police)

General Gouvernement (Non-incorporated Poland 1939-45)
Kreisbauernfiihrer (County Peasant Leader)
Landesbauernfihrer (State Peasant Leader)
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National
Socialist German Worker’s Party)

Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (German Army High
Command)

Preussische Landesrentenbank (Prussian Agricultural Credit
Bank)

Reichsamt für Agrarpolitik (National Office for Agricultural
Policy)

Reichsfinanzministeriam (National Finance Ministry)
Reichsjustizministerium (National Justice Ministry)
Reichskommissariat für die Festigung Deutschen Volkstums
(National Commissariat for the Strengthening of
Germanness)

Reichsministerium für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft (National
Ministry of Food and Agriculture)

|
\
i
|
|
|
|
i
|
1
i

RNS
RuS
RuSHA

SA
SPD

G.B.,
IfCH
NDG

TWCN:
UB/TB

AHR
BuL
DAP

DLA
HZ
JBD
JCH
JHI

_ JMH

PSQ
RGB

VB
VihfZg
ZAGAS
ZWS

List of Abbreviations

Reichsnährstand (National Food Estate) .

Rasse-und Siedlungsamt (Race and Settlement Office)

SS Rasse-und Siedlungs Hauptamt (SS Race and Settlement
Main Office)

‘Sturmabteilung (Storm Division)

Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (German Social
Democratic Party)

Schutzstaffel (Protection Squad)

2. ARCHIVAL ABBREVIATIONS

Bundesarchiv Koblenz (Federal Archives, Coblenz)

Darre Nachlass (Institute for Contemporary History,
Munich)

Grosser Bericht

Institute for Contemporary History, Munich

Nachlass Darr&, Stadtarchiv, Goslar (Darr&’s papers, Goslar
City Archive)

Trials ofthe War Criminals at Nuremberg (Washington 1949)
Ursula Backe, Tagebuch (Frau Backe’s Diary)

3. JOURNAL ABBREVIATIONS
American Historical Review

Berichte über Landwirtschaft
Deutsche Agrarpolitik

"Deutschlands Erneuerung

Die Leichte Artillerie

Historische Zeitschrift
Jahrbuch des baltischen Deutschtums
Journal of Contemporary History

Journal ofthe History of Ideas

Journal of Modern History

Political Science Quarterly

Reichsgesetzblatt

Völkischer Beobachter

Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte

Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie
Zeitschrift für Wirtschaft-und Sozialgeschichte

213

Notes

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION, pages 1-3

1. See A.C. Bramwell, ‘National Socialist Agrarian Theory and

Practice, with Special Reference to Darré and the Settlement
Movement’, Oxford D. Phil Thesis (1982), chapter V.

. See, e.g., contemporary accounts of Nazi Germany by H.
Knickerbocker, Germany: Fascist or Soviet? (London, 1932); H.
Greenwood, The German Revolution (London, 1934); and the
valuable economic study by C. Guillebaud, The Economic Recovery
of Germany 1933-38 (London, 1939), which devotes considerable
space to agriculture.

. K. Bergmann, Agrarromantik und Grosstadtfeindschaft (Meisenheim/
Glan, 1970) pp. 361-4; K. Bracher, Die deutsche Diktatur (Berlin,
1969), pp. 168 ff, D. Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National
Socialism: Social Darwinism, Emst Haeckel and the German Monist
League (New York, 1971), p. xxii; D. Orlow, The History of the
Nazi Party, 1919-1933 (Pittsburgh, 1969), p. 80. Bergmann,
Agraromantik, pp. 247 ff., dismisses the Artamanen settlement group
as ‘a romantic-illusory irrational and destructive ideology’. F.
Grundmann’s otherwise fine and comprehensive study of the
Hereditary Farm Law is also marred by constant references to
‘agrarian fanatics’, e.g., Agrarpolitik im Dritten Reich; Anspruch und
Wirklichkeit des Reichserbhofgesetzes (Hamburg, 1979), pp. 21-8,
151, 157, 228.

. G. Mann, “The Second German Empire: the Reich that Never
Was’, in Upheaval and Continuity (London, 1973), pp. 39, 45-6.

. The autonomy which has been returned to the peasantry as a class
in recent English writing, has still not been restored to the Junkers,
see D. Blackbourn, Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine
Germany (Yale, 1980), and I. Farr, ‘Populism in the Countryside:
the Peasant Leagues in Bavaria in the 1890s’, in, ed, R. Evans,
Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (London, 1978).

. See, for example, the interesting essays in the October 1984 issue
of the JCH by Milan Hauner, Jeffrey Herf and Jost Hermand.

en nes

SOON

nn y

Notes to pages 3-5

7. For example, there is the case of the ‘internal émigrés’, and those

10.

11.

12.

with more unambiguous loyalties, such as Gottfried Benn and
Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger. Where artists and intellectuals
began their work before National Socialism came to power,
continued to work, fell silent, then recommenced after the war
with no noticeable difference in style and subject matter, how is
one to distinguish between German and National Socialist? That is
not to argue that the distinction is impossible, only that the
question is complicated. .

. eg., K. Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf,

1974), D. Warriner, The Economics of Peasant Farming (London,
1939, repr. 1964), A. Mayhew, Rural Settlement and Farming in
Germany (London, 1973), M. Tracy, Agriculture in Western Europe
since 1880 (London, 1974); H. Haushofer, Vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis
zur Gegenwart, vol. 2 of Ideengeschichte der Agrarwirtschaft und
Agrarpolitik im deutschen Sprachgebiet (Bonn, 1958), cited hereafter as
Ideengeschichte, K. Brandt, The Management of Agriculture in the
German-Occupied and Other Areas of Fortress Europe: A Study in
Military Government (Stanford, 1953) and the works of Alan
Milward. This is obviously not a comprehensive list, nor is a full
historiographic treatment appropriate here. The one
straightforward, economic and social history treatment of Nazi
agricultural policy that has been written, John Farquharson’s The
Plough and the Swastika (London, 1976), which broke new ground
and is an excellent survey of the subject, was attacked on
publication for its lack of ‘an effectively analytical. framework’,
presumably because it contained insufficient adjectives, and is
unfortunately out of print. i

. See J. Robinson, An Essay on Marxist Economics (London, 1942)

and on Marx’s anti-semitism, for example L. Feuer, ‘Karl Marx
and the Promethean complex’, Encounter (December, 1968), p. 26.
F. Engels, ‘End of Classical German Philosophy’, in ed. L. Feuer,
Marx and Engels, Basic Writings (London, 1976), p. 270.

Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell der nordischen Rasse (Munich, 1929)
and Neuadel aus Blut und Boden (Munich, 1930). Neither book is
available in English. There are sorme extracts from Darré’s speeches
in B.M. Lane and L. Rupp’s Nazi Ideology Before 1933; a
Documentation (Manchester, 1978).

Silvio Gesell (1862-1930) was also Finance Minister of the 1919
Munich Soviet Republic, but see A. Tyrell, ‘Gottfried Feder and
the NSDAP’, in ed. P. Stachura, the Shaping of The Nazi State

215

Notes to pages 6-13

13.
14.

20.

22.
23.

. G. Lewis,

. eg., G.K. Chesterton’s introduction to W. Cobbett,

(London, 1978), pp. 59, 61, who argues that Feder disliked Gesell’s
‘free money’ views.

D. Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema (Oxford, 1983).

For ‘example, see ‘Problems of an Overcrowded Profession’, by
John Cherrington, Financial Times, 15.1.85, on, i.a, French
restrictions on farmland tenure, and General Dayan: ‘Living on the
land is the most essential thing for the individual and the nation ...
Jews should stay on the land.’ in Newsnight, BBC 2, 16.10.81.

‘The Peasantry, Rural Change and Conservative
Agrarianism. Lower Austria and the Turn of the Century’, Past and
Present, 80 (1978), p. 142.

. For Chayanov and von Thiinen, see The Theory of Peasant Economy,

ed. D. Thorner, et. al. (Illinois, 1966).
Cottage
Economy (London, 1926), H.J. Massingham, ed., The Small Farmer
(London, 1947), passim, and Emile de Lavelaye, ‘Land Systems of
Belgium and Holland’, in Systems of Land Tenure in Various
Countries (London, 1870), pp. 244-5, 251.

. See, e.g., A Polonksy, The Little Dictators (London, 1975), for an

account of the Successor States and their economic problems.

. Bergmann, Agrarromantik, pp. 362-4, and see also A. Schweitzer,

Big Business in the Third Reich (Bloomington, 1964), who sees the
German peasants as a residual, obstructive group. The ‘anti-
industrialisation reaction’ view is so prevalent that it is hardly
worth while giving further examples. The reader may like to start
compiling his own list.

British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee Overall Report, no. `

6, Some Agricultural Aspects in Germany during the Period 1939-45
(London, 1948).

. As defined in Frank and Fritzie Manuel’s Utopian Thought in the

Western World (Oxford, 1979).
M. Heidegger, The End of Philosophy (London, 1956), pp: 107, 110.
Ibid., p. 109.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

216

Neue deutsche Biographie, p. 517; Der deutsche Führerlexicon, p. 34-5;
Reischle, H., Reichsbauernführer Darré: der Kampfer um Blut um Boden
(Berlin, 1933), hereafter referred to as Darré; photographs, Darré
Nachlass, City Archive, Goslar (hereafter refered to as NDG) file
21; Darré’s curriculum vitae, 31.12.29, Federal Archives (hereafter

Notes to pages 14-18

| referred to as BA), NL941/9, and R. Oskar Darré, Meine Erziehung

11.

12.
. Ibid., p. 32.
14.

15.

. Darré’s school papers and reports,

im Elternhause und durch das Leben (Wiesbaden, not dated, c. 1925).

. R. Oskar Darré, Erziehung.
. Darré’s father and his drinking problem, Darré to Alma (née Stadt), .

his first wife, 25.11.23., Darré papers, Institute for Contemporary
History, Munich, ED 110/8 (all the Institute Darré papers which
have the file no ED, will simply be numbered under that headling
in these notes); Carmen Darré to Darré, referring to ‘Darréan idleness,
excluding our father, naturally,’ 20.X1.19, and 8.X1.19., NDG/76a.
NDG/462. King’s College
Magazine, vol. xxxv, 3, 1933, pp. 34-5, and correspondence with
KCS Registrar and author, 1978. See Reischle, Darré, p. 13, where
the effect of his English education was stressed. Darré had deleted
any reference to it from his c.v. of 1929.

. W.W. Schmokel, Dream of Empire: German Colonialism, 1919-1943

(London, 1964), pp. 44-5; Meyer’s Lexicon (Leipzig, 1927), p. 1571.

. See Darré’s passes and passports, including Argentinian consular

material, NDG/461, Argentinian passport of 1927, and
correspondence with the Argentinian consul in Wiesbaden, 15.5.22,
NDG/77a, and IfCH Interrogation, 10.3.47, p. 2.

. Diary, ED 110/6, Reischle, Darré, pp. 19-21.
. Diary, 8.12.18, and date unclear, file pages 21, 27-8, ED 110/6, and

note from the Witzenhausen 11 Mar. Brigade, 14.8.19, NDG/76a.

. In ED 110/6.
. For Darré’s Stahlhelm membership, see letters to family and friends

over this period, 31.5.27, Darré still on their membership list and re-
ceiving Stahlhelm literature, NDG/83a, and IfCH, Interrogation, p. 6.
Homeopathic chemist to Darré, 10.5.22, NDG/77: Nature healer
diagnosis, January 1924, NDG/78a (tendency to TB).

R. O. Darré, Erziehung, p. 32.

Passes and restrictions, see letters Oskar Darré to Darré, 1.8.19,
10.8.19, on foreign affairs, 25.2.20, NDG/76a.

Arthur Kracke (ex-soldier friend of Darré’s) to Darré, 21.5.29,
NDG/76c. F. Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics 1918-1933
(Oxford, 1966), pp. 22-3: E.E. Dwinger, Wir Rufen Deutschland
(Leipzig, 1932), p. 16, quoted in R. Taylor, Literature and Society in
Germany; 1918-1945 (Sussex, 1980), p. 15 and see also 257, where
Taylor comments that Dwinger was

a literary spokesman for the so-called conservative revolution of
the late 1920s and early 1930s ... entitled to be seen, at least in

217

Notes to pages 18-21

16.

17.

18.
. G. Field, Evangelist of Race: the Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart

20.

21.
. Darré to Alma, 19.10.19, ED 110/6.

23. Darr& to Alma, 24.11.20, ED 110/6. Another echo of Bélsche’s |

24.
25.

218

part, as men engaged in the not dishonourable task of salvaging a
national self-respect from the failures of an inglorious regime, not
as rabble-rousers in the service of National Socialism.

V. Berghahn, Der Stahlhelm; Bund der Frontsoldaten (Düsseldorf,
1966), p. 7.

One interesting biographical account of the Freikorps available in
English is Friedrich Glombowski, Frontiers of Terror (London,
1935), tr. K. Kirkness. See also I. Morrow, The Peace Settlement in
the German-Polish Borderlands (London, 1936), and E. v. Salomon,
Der Fragebogen (Hamburg, 1951). See also M. Sering and C. von
Dietze, ed., Agrarverfassung der deutschen Auslandssiedlungen in
Osteuropa (Berlin, 1939).

A. Nicholls, Weimar and the Rise of Hitler (London, 1968), ch. 5.

Chamberlain (Columbia, 1981), p. 408.

German Colonial School to Oskar Darré, 3.5.19, NDG/76a: Diary,
29.3.19, ED 110/6, and 9.1.19, ED 110/6. The eldest Darrés,
Richard Walther and Carmen, were very close, and were to
remain friends. They formed an alliance to protect the younger
members of the family, especially Ise, from the father, Carmen
even attempted to remove Ilse from an unhappy home atmosphere
in 1919, when she complained that her father was ‘such a fuss-pot,
and blind to the good things in life’. Carmen to Darré, 3.10.19,
8.11.19, NDG/76a.

Diary, 14.10.19, ED 110/6.

nature-worship appeared when he wrote, ‘You know how much |
feel a sense of affirmation towards Nature’s love-life (Liebesleben).
In the same way, I affirm physical love between people.’ 20.11.20,
ED 110/6. Darré persuaded her to take up gymnastics, writing that
the ‘body is a reservoir of strength; it should be regarded
correctly’, 30.10.23, ED 110/8. Ironically, Darré damaged a leg in a
400 metres race in 1936, and his absence from his office at a crucial
period gravely weakened his political position.

Darré to Alma, 20.11.20, ED 110/6.

In late 1920 they sent specimen of each other’a handwriting to a
graphologist. Alma’s apparently’ showed that she was strong-willed,
truthful, affectionate, impatient. Darré ‘had a lively, suffering
temperament; self-discipline; a feeling for what is good, noble and
honourable.’ Stefanie von Tschudi, 13.11.20, ED 110/6. i

A Saa y à

rn ua I wt ann

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

Notes to pages 21-25

27.11.20, NDG/80, and see subsequent correspondence, and BA
NL94I/9, which contains letters from Darré to his Hanover lawyers,
and the lawyers’ letters to the new headmaster at Witzenhausen.
Darré was nominated for membership of the officer’s union, the
von Scharnhorst, 14.8.29, NDG/85a. For details of degree marks,
see NDG/462.

See letters NDG/77a and 77b, e.g., 5.5.22, 23.2.22, 1.8.19, 1.8.19,
and the reference to Darré’s heart problems (somewhat sarcastic),
Oskar Darré to Darré, 21.8.19, NDG/76a.

Darré insisted on taking out an individual membership in the
Vereinigung deutscher Schweinezuchter, although the farm already had
a joint membership, 29.X1.21, NDG/77b. The letter refusing him
the post, 18.1.22; correspondence concerning smallholdings and
farms, November 1921 to March 1922, all NDG/77a.

Darré’s aunt, 8.12.22, NDG/77b; GCS to Oskar Darré, 16.11.78,
NDG/76c; Oskar Darré to Darré, 10.8.19, NDG/76a, and postcard,
Ilse to Darré, no date, NDG/76b.

Darré’s debts, see 16.4.22, NDG/80, and subsequent correspondence.
Erich Darré to Darré, 25.7.22, NDG/77b. Erich Darré shared the
family’s Anglophilia. He sent Darré a card from one visit to England,
written in fractured English; ‘the beer causes that we all double
see’.

See Oskar Darré to Darré, 1920-22, NDG/76c and especially 23.5.20
and 28.5.20.

Darré to Oskar Darré on Lagarde, February, 1925, NDG/80. Tonio
Kröger was among the books forwarded to him front. Gut Aumühle,
16.8.22, NDG/80. For the von der Vogelweide quote, Darré to
Oskar Darré, 11.11.23, NDG/80. Darré to Alma, c. October 1923
(file pages 881-2), ED 110/8, and 21.2.22, NDG/77a. One letter to
his wife refers to Kotzde’s autobiography. Kotzde was the leader of
a German youth group, Adler and Falken, and co-founder of the
Artamanen, see G. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (London,
1964), p. 116, and 8.12.16, ED 110/9.

Halle curriculum, NDG/80. Reports, NDG/462. See also Darré’s
letters to his wife concerning a study of the hereditary transmission
of musical ability carried out by Halle students for Professor
Kramer, 12.2.23, ED 110/8.
‘Internal Colonisation’,

Deutschlands Erneuerung, 1926. Cf.

Schmokel, Dreams of Empire, p. 91.
South American friend to Darré, 15.4.25, NDG/79, and 10.5.27,
NDG/83b.

219

Notes to pages 25-29

37.

38.
39.
40.

41.
42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

220

Darr to Oskar Darré, 19.7.25, on the Prussian Ministry of
Agriculture’s refusal to recognise Witzenhausen’s traning, NDG/80,
and Ilse to Darré, 11.6.27, NDG/83a.

Report, NDG/78a. Dancing lessons, Oskar Darré to Darré, 21.8.19,
NDG/76a.

See passports in NDG/462.

NDG/462. Darré was involved in a serious quarrel at Giessen, that
ended up with the student Court of Honour there. See
correspondence, February and March, 1926, NDG/81a. ;
See bibliography, BA NL 9411/49.

See G. Stokes, ‘The Evolution of Hitler’s Ideas on Foreign Policy’,
in P. Stachura, ed., The Shaping of the Nazi State (London, 1978). I

am indebted to Dr Eleaner Breuning, of University College,

Swansea, for information about the Prussian Ministries and their
representatives abroad.

Darré to Dr Kurschat, 29.7.26, Darré to the head of the East Prussian
Trakhener Society, 6.8.26, both NDG/81b.

This quality was to stand horses and owners in good stead when
the remarkable operation to rescue the bloodstock from the
Russians took place in 1945. Barely half the horses survived the
flight across the frozen Haff. The East Prussian Chamber of
Agriculture summoned Darré to a meeting with the Russian
Consul, 15.3.27, NDG/82. Requests for posts for relatives, 5.6.28,
NDG/83b and subsequent corr. For the Trakheners, see Dr Fritz
Schilke, Trakhener Horses; Then and Now (Oklahoma, 1977), and
for the rescue attempt, pp. 116-7.
Darré to Alma, undated, but November 1926 from the contents
ED 110/9.
Darré to Alma, 15.2.27, ED 110/9. Darré’s report on Finland, NDG/
400.
Metzger’s report, NDG/81a. Metzger knew Dr Otto Auhagen
agricultural economist, whose thesis had concerned the superior
qualities of small farm productivity. Auhagen visited Russia several
times during the 1920s. In 1939, in his seventies, he was apparently
drafted into the SS, to help draw up plans to settle German
peasants in the East. Darré’s plea to Metzger, 5.5.27, and Metzger to
Darré, 10.5.27, both NDG/83a. Darré’s acquaintances at this time
included several East Prussian landowners, such as Rodbertus-
Januschau, vom Zitzewitz, Freiherr von Wangenheim, of the
Agrarian League, and von Schwerin, who advised him to contact
Baron Manteuffel, 15.9.26, NDG/82.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

Notes to pages 29-35

Edgar Jung to Darré, 11.5.28, NDG/84a. See also chapter Three.
For Von Behr to Darré, 14.4.27, NDG/83a.

Reischle, Darré, pp 29-30. Darré to Alma, undated letter, ED 110/9.
Telegram, NDG/85a and Darré to Alma, 21.2.29, and 24.2.29 ED
110/9.

Darré to Jacob Stadt, his father-in-law, 1.6.29, ED 110/9. IfCH,
Interrogation, 10.3.47, p. 4. The court case is mentioned in a letter
from Darré to Duckwitz, Legation Councillor at Reval, 31.7.29,
NDG/89a. Sohn-Rethel. Economy and Class Structure of German
Fascism (London, 1978), p. 69. Sohn-Rethel thought that Reusch,
head of a huge industrial combine, was able to find Darré a post in
the National Ministry of Agriculture, but offers no reason why
Reusch should have been able to create and dispose of civil service
posts at will, nor why he should have favoured Darré, although
Sohn-Rethel claims that Darré was so exceptionally stupid that he
was considered their ideal protector by German industry. Sohn-
Rethel is an excellent example of the cavalier attitude to facts, and
the easy conspiratorial theorising which might be called the ‘Claud
Cockburn syndrome’.

Letter of rejection, DE to Darré, 23.6.25, NDG/79. The essay is in
NDG/80. See Darré to Alma, 19.1.23, ED 110/8.

For a picture of the demonstration, see Der Stahlhelm; Errinerungen
und Bilder (Berlin, 1932), p.' 185. Darr& wrote to his father from
Giessen that ‘in the summer of 1925 it was risky to wear the
Stahlhelm insignia in public; especially at the time of the Rathenau
murder. Three years later, the Stahlhelm rules the streets in Halle
13.12.25, NDG/80. Darr& attended these rallies and veteran’s
reunions (banned, but held under the guise of a ‘Prussian Day’)
between 1922 and 1925, see e.g. 25.X1.22, NDG/77b.

Darré to Oskar Darré, 13.12.25, NDG/80.

Darré to Oskar Darré, 11.11.23 and 19.11.23, NDG/80

For the DVFP, see J. Noakes, The Nazi party in Lower Saxony
(Oxford, 1971), pp. 28-9. The 1937 attack is by Fr. vom
Wangenheim, in ‘Dietrich Eckhart und Ich’, Der deutsche Bauer,
15.3.37. See Darré to Alma, 12.2.23, ED 110/8, and see chapter
Four for Alma Darré’s Party membership.

J.M. Keynes; The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London,

1920), p. 234, quoting a report published in Sweden in April 1919.
N: Hamilton, The Brothers Mann (London, 1978), p. 216, and cf. P
Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria
(London, 1964), p. 5, ‘fJews] contributed to [liberalism’s}

224

Notes to pages 37-42

establishment, benefited from its institutions, and were under fire
when it was attacked’.

58. Darré to Alma, anti-semitism, 19.1.23, the ‘Soviet star’, 21.7.23, ED

Notes to pages 42-47

Konopath to Darré, 19.1.27, NDG/84a. Günther asked Darre to push
his book in England. if he had connections there, as ‘the press is
Jewish influenced or Jewish led’, 29.X1.27, NDG/84a.

110/8. For student anti-semitism, see Mosse, Crisis, pp. 268-9. 10. For the ban on Lanz von Liebenfels, see E. Howe, Astrology in the
Third Reich (London, 1984), p. 111. Schultze-Naumburg and
NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO secrecy, see his letter to Darré, 30.7.30, in NDG/87a, with the
1. G.G. Field, ‘Nordic Racism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 38 minutes of ‘a secret meeting at Saaleck’ and talk of hochwertigen
(1977), 523, and introduction to Northern Legends (London, 1902), Rassenkerns. See also Darré and his Friends of the German
tr. M. Bentinck, on ‘Northern’, ‘Teutonic’ and ‘Deutsch’. _ Peasantry, 1939, BA NL 94ll/ld, and Günther on Protestants
. H.S. Chamberlain, Foundations of the Twentieth Century (London, | preferable to Catholics, Racial Elements, p. 219.
1911), tr. John Lees, vol. 1, pp. xvi, 522, 529, and H. F. K. Günther, i 11. See R. Lougee’s Paul de Lagarde (Cambridge: Mass., 1962), for an
Kleine Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Munich, 1922). Günther was . excellent account of Langbehn (and Lagarde), and passim in Pulzer,
appointed Professor of Racial Hygiene at Jena in 1931 by Frick, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism.
then National Socialist Minister for Education in Thuringia. The 12. E. von Salomon, Die Fragebogen (Hamburg, 1951), pp. 30-31.
literary journal Die Zone, 24.12.33 (Paris and Vienna), ed. Emil 13. Anonymous critic, describing himself as a ‘Lower Saxon Peasant’,
Szittya, carried a picture story showing various important German Est, Est, Est: Randbemerkungen zu ‘Rembrandt als Erzieher’, n.d., p.
political figures, including Ludendorff, von Epp and Goering, with 22. Darré to Alma Darré on Langbehn, 24. X1.26, ED 110/9.
the heading ‘Racial Beauty does not exist in Germany’. 14. Darré to Alma Darré, 14.1.24, ED 110/8, and 9.10.26 and 5.12.26,
Anyone could play the game of racial categorisation. One writer recommending Giinther’s Style and Race, ED 110/9.
who criticised H.S. Chamberlain’s work for a lack of scholarliness 15. Neuadel, quotations here taken from the French translation, La
attributed it to a ‘powerful Anglo-Celtic inclination’, Field, Race, 1939, p. 114. Darré to Alma Darré, 14.1.24, ED 110/8. Darré on
Evangelist of Race, p. 234. Prussia, 21.X1.25, ED 110/8, ‘The meaning of Prussianness is not
. C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, (London, 1955), p. 74, and see also just a kingdom, but the pure concept of. Duty ... heterogeneous
pp. 75, 78, 123. Two of his friends became Anthroposophists, pp. $ elements formed a unity through the Prussian Idea’.
194, 196-7. 16. R. W. Darré, ‘Walther Rathenau und das Problem des nordischen
. Field, ‘Nordic Racism’, p. 533. Menschen’, DE, vii (1926). Salomon, Die Fragebogen (English
. For the Bauernhochschulbewegung see K. Bergmann, Agrarromantik | translation, The Answers of Ernst von Salomon), p. 57. Rathenau and
and Field, “Nordic Racism’, p. 532. Lenz is quoted in H. Lutzhéft, ; Theodore Roosevelt both liked Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s
Der nordische Gedanke in Deutschland 1920-1940 (Stuttgart, 1971), p. work, though Roosevelt criticised its ‘startling inaccuracies’, Field,
136. For Varuna see Mosse, Crisis, p. 115, Lutzhoft, op. cit., pp. Evangelist of Race, p. 466.
134-6, Field, op. cit., p. 529. 17. Coudenhove-Kalergi, Newadel (Leipzig, 1922). As a guru of the
. e.g. M. Weber, ‘Power’, in Essays in Sociology, ed. H. Gerth and European movement, Kalergi has been the subject of at least one
C. Wright Mills (London, 1967), pp. 177-8, and see H.F.K. hagiographic biography by Euro-hacks. The pamphlet received
Giinther, The Racial Elements in European History (London, 1927), i little attention.
passim. | 18. Dr Oskar Levy, introduction to Gobineau, The Renaissance, tr. P.
. See Field, Evangelist of Race, pp. 296-7, and Chamberlain, Cohn (London, 1913), and see R. Hinton-Thomas, Nietzsche in
Foundations, pp. 517-20. German Politics and Society, 1890-1918 (Manchester 1984), pp. 101-2.
. See description in Lutzhöft, Nordischer Gedanke, passim, Field, 19. R.W. Darré, ‘Walther Rathenau und die Bedeutung der Rasse in
‘Nordic Racism’, p. 532, and Knut Hamsun’s novels, especially der Weltgeschichte’, DE, 1, 1928.
Mysteries, Growth of the Soil and Chapter the Last. 20. For correspondence concerning the Nordic Ring, membership lists
9. eg. Lehmann to Darré, correspondence in NDG/84a: Konopacki- i and meetings, see NDG/84a. For Die Sonne, see Mosse, Crisis, pp.
222 ko 223

Notes to pages 47-52

21.

22.

24.

25.

26.

27.
28.

29.

78, 83, 106. Darré refers to his first meeting with Günther, through
the ‘Rathenau’ article, 30.1.32, ED 110/10.

For. Vietinghoff-Scheel, see Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-
Semitism, p. 305.

Marie Adelheid Princessin Reuss to Darré, 12.1.26, and Darré’s reply
from Insterburg, not dated, both NDG/84a. Hanno Konopacki-
Konopath to Darre, 19.1.27, NDG/84a.

. cf. here, Jeremy Noakes, ‘Nazism and Eugenics: the Background to

the Nazi Sterilisation Law of 14 July 1933’, in Ideas into Politics
(London, 1984), ed. R. Buller, H. Pogge von Strandmann, and A.
Polonsky, p. 75: ‘For both the eugenics programme to improve

German racial hygiene and the programme of anti-semitism,

ultimately derived from a common perspective, a perspective
which viewed man and society not simply in biological terms but
from a particular Social Darwinist viewpoint’. As mentioned in the
Introduction to this book, work can be scrupulously scholarly, and
carefully annotated in its factual detail, yet be misleading in its
general conclusions. Incidentally, the term Social Darwinism first
came into common use in the 1940s, after Richard Hofstadter’s
influential book on the subject, Social Darwinism in American
Thought (New York, 1944).

Details of conference, NDG/87b and see also Nordic Conference
Programme for 1930, in ED 110/11, with list of participants, such
as the Kampfbund for German Culture, the German Richard
Wagner Society, etc.

Professor V. Stranders, MA; he was a member of the Territorial

Army up to January 1915, and at some time during the First
World War was a captain in the Royal Air Corps. He went to
Germany with the Allied Control Commission as head of
translations for the Air Branch in 1919. See his two books: Die
Wirtschaftsspionage der Entente (Berlin, 1929) and Vernichtung über
Deutschland (Berlin, 1933), both extremely anti-French.

Mosse, Crisis, pp. 71-2. Darré to Hitler, 11.12.39, BA NS 10/37,
enclosing von Leers’ comments on Hore-Belisha. Union of
German Druids to Darré, 19.10.34, BA R16/2141.

Postcard, Darré to Konopath, NDG/84a.

Giinther to Darré, suggesting that he answer Kern, 5.11.27, NDG/
84a.

For nomadic architecture, see my chapter Four, and B. Miller
Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany: 1918-1945 (Cambridge,
Mass., 1968), p. 159. Konopath told Darré that through Kern’s

31.

32.
33.

35.

Notes to pages 52-54

arguments, “We have surrendered our position to the Jews’,
17.4.28, NDG/84a.

. On Faustian and nomadic nature of the Nordics, Gtinther to Darré,

5.11.27, NDG/84a, and on Darré’s understanding of racial questions,
Giinther to Darré, letter not dated, NDG/87a.

Lehmann to Darré, stressing the need for the sterilisation of the
hereditary sick, especially blind and deaf people, 28.7.28.: Darré too
outspoken on sexual matters, 30.7.28., both NDG/84b. For a
discussion of Lehmann, see G. Stark, Entrepreneurs of Ideology: Neo-
Conservative Publishers in Germany, 1890-1933 (Chapel Hill, 1981).
Giinther to Darré on his style, undated letter, NDG/84a.

R Eichenauer, ‘Heraus mit Eurem Flederwisch’, Die Sonne (Feb.
1931). Eichenauer to Darré, 29.12.28, and subsequent
correspondence, all NDG/84b.

. B. Miller Lane and L. Rupp, Nazi Ideology Before 1933

(Manchester, 1978), p. xxvii. Darré’s book eventually appeared as
Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell der nordischen Rasse (Munich, 1929),
cited hereafter as Das Bauerntum. For the request to delete foreign
words, see Günther to Darre, 5.X1.27, NDG/84a, and Lehmann to
Darré, 14.X1.28, NDG/84b. Darré earned 1350 marks for the book.
It eventually sold some 40,000 copies, but in the first year only
sold about 750.

For Darré the unwordly philosopher, see H. Schacht. My First
Seventy-six Years (London, 1955) p. 328, and Kerrl; also my
chapter Five, and Clifford R. Lovin’s fine thesis on Darré and his
programme, drawn from secondary sources only, and thus a
particularly impressive achievement, stressing Darré’s role as
practical agrarian economist, ‘German Agricultural Policy, 1933-
36,’ Ph.D. Thesis, University of North Carolina, 1965.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

K. Meyer, ‘Lebensbericht’, unpublished memoirs, pp. 96-7. The
Goebbels Diaries (London, 1948), tr. and ed. Louis Lochner, p. 168.
Lochner’s definition of ‘blood and soil’ includes the explanation:
‘Nordic blood was the best in the world, and there could be
nothing more perfect than to have been born on German soil’, also
p. 168.

. E.g. D. Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933-45

(Oxford, 1983), pp. 96, 137-8. I. Berlin, ‘Benjamin Disraeli and
Karl Marx’, in Against The Current (Oxford, 1982), p. 268.

Notes to pages 54-59

11.

12.

226

Interview with Dr H. Merkel and interview with F. Krausse,
April, 1984. .
See.pictures in B. Hinze, Art in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1980),
esp. pp. 86-7, 91-7, and Deutsche Agrarpolitik, as Odal was re-
named.

. See ‘The Folk-Community’, Rising, 2 (1982), p. 4.
. Damaschke pops in and out of the literature according to whether

he is seen as a suspect proto-Nazi (repulsive but interesting) or as a

‘kind of German Fabian (nice but boring). His autobiography, Aus

Meinem Leben (Leipzig, 1924), is frankly dull. The late nineteenth
century saw a surge in socialist, Utopian, teetotal social-reformers,

and Damaschke belongs in that galére. On the population decline, .

see N. Jasny, Bevölkerungsrückgang und Landwirtschaft (Berlin, 1931), p.
8

. See e.g. the Spanish nationalist writer Menendez y Pelayo, who

also liked to contrast Mediterranean traditions with Northern
European ones; D. Foard, ‘The Spanish Fichte’, JCH, 14 (Jan,
1979), esp. p. 91. Writers since Gibbon have been puzzling over
the causes of political and cultural distinctions between North and
South Europe.

. R.W. Darré, ‘Stedingen’, Odal, 3 (934-5), and see also R. Cecil,

The Myth of the Master Race; Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology
(London, 1972), pp. 96, 165-6.

. R.W. Darré, ‘Innere Kolonisation’, DE (1926), pp. 154-5.
. R.W. Darre, ‘Zur Wiedergeburt des Bauerntums’, DE (1931),

reprinted Blut und Boden (Munich, 1941), p. 60.

Hugenberg and Darré, see ed. J. Noakes and G. Pridham, Documents

on Naziism, 1919-1945 (London, 1974), p. 386; Charles W. Smith,
Introduction to G. Ruhland, The Ruin of the World’s Agriculture
and Trade (London, 1896). The 16.1.33. Milchgesetz, introducing a
Price Commissioner, is in BA R4311/192.

R. Bertrand, ‘Le Nationale-Socialisme et La Terre’, Etudes
économiques (1938), esp. p. 27, is a fairly sympathetic account:

Thus reduced to a technique of intervention, German
corporatism appears heavy with chains and light on spiritual
élan, compared with ideal corporate construction. But is this
through the will of the masters, or by inevitable conditions?

See also introduction to the French edition of Neuadel, La Race
(Paris, 1939). Darré was still paying his debt to Ruhland in 1941;

13.

14.

Notes to pages 59-62

see Dr H. Reischle, ‘Von Ruhland zu Darr&’, Die Landware (Berlin,
14.9.41), p. 1. See Rundschreiben no. 65, NDG/142, and articles in
Odal on Ruhland, April and November 1935.

Telegram from Verband der Mitteldeutschen Industrie to von
Schleicher, 13.1.33, BA R4311/192.

B. Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918-1945
(Cambridge, Mass., 1968), pp. 136-7, and see Schultze-Naumburg,
‘Müssen wir künftig in asiatischen hausern wohnen?’, 12.3.31, article

in Darre’s files, ED 110/11. The President of the Agricultural

15.

16.
17.

19.

20.
22.
. Darré’s diary, 2.6.34.
24.

25.

Chamber wrote to von Schleicher complaining about architects in
agriculture, 7.1.33, BA R4311/192.

Schultze-Naumburg, in report to the Friends of the German
Peasantry Society, BA NL94II/1d; Miller Lane, Architecture and
Politics, p. 133; for Mies van der Rohe, see D. Watkins, Morality
and Architecture (London, 1977), p. 97.

Haeckel, The Wonders of Life (London, 1905), p. 157.

Lenz, quoted in Loren R. Graham, ‘Science and Values; the
Eugenics Movement in Germany and Russia in the 1920s’, AHR,
82 (1977), p. 1143, and epigraph to Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Adel
(Leipzig, 1922).

. Langbehn, quoted in P. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism

in Germany and Austria (London, 1964), p. 240.

Haushofer, Ideengeschichte, p. 31. Alfred Kelly’s excellent analysis of
Darwinist thought in Germany, The Descent of Darwin; the
Popularisation of Darwinism in Germany, 1860-1914 (North Carolina,
1981), gives a comprehensive and fascinating account of Bdlsche.
Bölsche went on to write a biography of Haeckel, which, in the
heady intellectual climate of pre First World War England, was
almost immediately translated into English.

Moeller van den Bruck, The Third Reich (Berlin,/London, 1923), p. 22.
21. Quoted in Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race, pp. 119-120.
Darré’s diary, 20.9.33.

See Darré’s circular to members of the National Peasant Council,
10.3.36, BA R 16/2045.

Rosenberg to Darré, 7.1.26, BA NS2/41, and Darré’s circular to the
National Peasant Council, 10.3.36, BA R16/2045. For the Nordic
Gathering, see circular to N.P.C., 23.5.38, BA NS26/947. See
Lutzhöft, Nordischer Gedanke, p. 332, where Lutzhöft charts the
Nordic movement’s decline and resentment at its loss of influence
and contacts.

227

Notes to pages 62-66

32.

34.

35.

36.

37.

. Darré, SS affidavit, p. 8.

. Darré’s Diary, 22.6.39. ;

. R.W. Darré, ‘Blut und Boden’, Odal 1935).

. M. Hauner, in India in Axis Strategy (Stuttgart, 1981), p. 49, refers
to the ‘anti-colonial but less important group of “radical agrarians”
... centred around Walter (sic) Darré’.

. The reprint is in Blut und Boden (Munich, 1940).

. ‘Farming, Community and State’ (Lane and Rupp translation),
VB, 19-20.3.31. the DE version of 1930 is slightly longer.
Bergmann, in Agrargomantik, p. 308, comments on the omission,
but misses the point, that Darré had deliberately passed up an

attempt to align himself with the regime, and had instead,

disassociated himself from the eastward expansion that in the end
actually took place.

Hitler, Mein Kampf (London, 1939), pp. 124-5.

. Dr Edgar Jung to Darré, 27.10.27, NDG/84a.

Darré did quote from Moeller in Neuadel, p. 255. Moeller
committed suicide in 1925, and was therefore spared the dilemma
of other messianic neo-conservatives in 1933. His phrases and
rhetoric turn up in Backe’s notes around 1931, possibly through
Darré’s influence. For German eugenics and eugenicists, see Dr Paul
Weindling’s forthcoming book on the subject. Darré had
sympathetic criticism from the Deutsche Ritterband in 1929. See
NDG/84a and 157 for Darré’s fan-mail.

See debates in the Prussian Landtag, Eheberatungstellen, Drucks. nr.

735 (Reports and Petitions), 1925-8. For Ploetz, see Graham,

‘Science and Values’, p. 1143, and Dr Paul Weindling, unpublished
seminar paper, Oxford, March, 1982, ‘Population Policy and
Eugenics in Germany, 1900-1930’.

For the British syphilis figures, W. MacNeill, Plagues and Peoples
(London, 1977), p. 285. The marriage certificate, urged by Agnes
Bluhm in 1905, was taken up by the Bund fiir Mutterschutz in
1907. See also Grete Meisel-Hess, ‘Mutterschutz als soziale
Weltanschauung’, Die Neue Generation, ‘the race with the greatest
vitality, the white race, should, as the bearer of the highest culture,
spread itself as widely as possible’, quoted in R. Hinton-Thomas’
valuable new book, Nietzsche in German Politics and Society, 1890-
1918 (Manchester, 1984), p. 93.

Dr Weindling, op. cit., and lectures, Michaelmas, Oxford, 1984.

. Graham, ‘Science and Values’, p. 1143.

. G. Sanvoisin, quoted in the Bulletin des Halles, quoted in Action

Notes to pages 66-75

Francaise (9.7.39). Lenz is quoted in Lutzh6ft, Nordischer Gedanke,
and see Darré to Lenz, 10.2.32, NDG/87a.

. E.g., Haase to Backe, BA NL75/10. Other works recommended

were by von List, Giinther, Rosenberg and Ludendorff.

. Stark, Entrepreneurs of Ideology, p. 195, but cf. Lehmann to Darré

over slow selling of Das Bauerntum in the first two years, only 750
copies by 1930, 6.2.31, NDG/86b.

. Das Bauerntum, p. 428.

. Neuadel, p. 225, and see also Das Bauerntum, pp. 226, 367.

. Neuadel, p. 259.

. cf. J. Lee, ‘Labour in German Industrialisation’, p. 459.

. E.g., L. Stoddard, The Revolt Against Civilisation (1922, repr. New

Orleans, 1950), and M. Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New
York, 1921).

. ‘Eugenics for the German People’, op. cit.
. Konopath, circular to the ‘Leader of biindischen Jugend’, 6.8.30,

NDG/87a.

. Darré to Konopath, 17.8.30, NDG/87b.

. R.W. Darté, ‘Die Frau im Reichsnahrstand’, Odal (March, 1934).

. Interview with Frau Backe, January, 1981.

. Neuadel, pp. 216-7.

. Ibid., pp. 217-8.

. Darr& to Alma, 25.11.23, and see also 21.11.25, 25.11.25, 19.1.23,

21.7.23, all ED 110/8.

. Neuadel, pp. 226, 229, 233.

. Ibid., pp. 241-2.

. Grundmann, Agrarpolitik, pp. 123-4.

. Darré to SS RuSHA (horses), 15.4.35, BA NS2/37: list of

educational events, BA NS2/108. In 18.5.37, Himmler told Darré
that Hitler had asked the SS RuSHA to speed up its processing of
SS applications to get married; they were some 20,000 behind. ‘He
told me, half smiling, half crying, that RuSHA was simply
preventing SS marriages’, BA NS2/41.

59. R. W. Darré, circular to RNS, 14.10.35, BA R16/2045.
60. Neuadel, p. 200.
NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR
1. For Habicht, see R.L. Koehl, The Black Corps (Wisconsin, 1983),

p. 105. The correspondence with Schultze-Naumburg is in NDG/
84a. For the reference to Günther see Darr& to Alma, 8.1.29, ED 110/
10. See also Holfelder to Hitler, 6.6.29, BA NS26/1285.

229

Notes to pages 75-78

von

10.
11.

12.

13.

14.

230

. See Dr Horst Rechenbach to Darre,

See NDG/84a. For Jiinger and Heidegger, copy letter: in author’s
possession, Ziegler to Darré, 5.11.52. Johst was given honorary
membership of the National Peasants’ Council in 1936, 1.9.36, BA
NS26/947.

14.6.32, NDG/87..
Rechenbach’s old teacher, a Professor of the Ethnology-
Anthropological Institute at Leipzig, sent Darré best wishes for his
‘extremely interesting and necessary work’, 13.9.30, NDG/87a.

. Farquharson, Plough and Swastika, pp. 16-17, citing Professor Horst

Gie’ ‘NSDAP und Landwirtschaftliche Organisation’, VjhZg
(1967), p. 343. Darré on Hugenberg to Lehmann, 15.12.29 and
Lehmann to Darré, 5.11.29, both NDG/437a.

. Lane and Rupp, in Nazi Ideology, p. xxi, suggest Himmler and

perhaps Strasser. Friedrich Grundmann, Agrarpolitik, suggests
Werner Willikens, and the fact that a typed copy of the manifesto
is in Backe’s papers (he was a close friend of Willikens) hints that
there is something in the idea. But according to Erwin Metzner,
‘Keeper of the Seal’ for the National Peasants’ Council, it was
written by Himmler and Hierl (see letter in author’s possession).
There seems no evidence for the idea that it was written by Darré
or Kenstler, and the prevalant text-book suggestion that it was
Darré’s work shows the cavalier attitude to basic historical research
by too many writers on this subject.

“Word for word’, see Darré to Ziegler, 27.3.30, NDG/87a.

. The memo is in BA NS35/1.
. Darré to Kenstler, 12.4.30, NDG/94.
. Darré to Ziegler, 7.5.30, NDG/94. The Institute was to be in

Weimar, but financed from the NSDAP headquarters in Munich,
see Darré to Alma, 23.7.30 and 27.3.30, ED 110/10. Darré to Alma
regarding Schultze-Naumburg’s card from Frau Bruckmann,
18.4.30, ED 110/10.

Darré to Kenstler, 25.4.30, NDG/94.

See Darré’s Interrogation by Dr Werner Klatt, 1945, Wiener
Library, N47 Darré J 36, p. 1. Darré to Lehmann asking for a loan,
28.5.30 and Darré to Kenstler re; money, 25.5.30, NDG/94.

See draft letter in NDG/94, and Darré to Kenstler, 28.5.30, ibid,
which mentions the phone call.

See Darré to Pietzsch discussing the agricultural crisis, 18.2.32,
NDG/87a.

Stark, Entrepreneurs of Ideology, p. 228.

. Conference, Darré to Alma, 13.6.30, ED 110/10.

i f
|
sf :
Bn ee Se A he et a

16.

29.

30.

31.

Notes to pages 78-81

Konopath, 25.2.31, and quotation, Darré to Konopath, 18.8.30,
both NDG/87a. For Darré being too busy to have time for the’
Nordic Ring, see 14.11.30, and ‘fighting to secure a place for
Blood and Soil ideals in the Party’, 24.4.31, both NDG/87a.

. Princess zur Lippe to author, 8.12.80.

. Darré to Alma, 8.7.30 and 27.9.30, both ED 110/10.

. 30.9.30, NDG/87a.

. Darré to Alma, before a visit to Weimar with Hitler, 11.4.31, and

quotation, 12.3.3.31, both ED110/11. The letter was seven and half
pages long.

. Darré to Alma, 1.3.30., ED 110/10.
. Darré to Alma, 6.9.32., ED 110/11.
. Interview with Frau Backe, 14.4.84 and Darré to Alma, 26.3.32, ED

110/11. Lehmann to Darré on Alma, and his feelings about the
impending divorce, 21.2.31, NDG/87a.

. Darré to Alma, 26.6.30, ED 110/10.

. Darre’s diary, 31.1.31.

. Lane and Rupp, Nazi Ideology, pp. 99-103.

. Otto Wagener, ed. H. Turner, Hitler aus nächster Nähe (Frankfurt a.

Main, 1978), pp. 250, 252. Darr& to Konopath, ‘Once you win
[Strasser] over, he’s a powerful ally’, n.d. but August 1930, NDG/87b.

. Wagener, Hitler, p. 212. Wagener claims to have selected Darré for

the economic department on Himmler’s recommendation, and
adds that Himmler told him he and Hess had studied with Darré.
This does not square with the version of Himmler’s education
given by his biographers (he studied in Munich); nor with the
picture of the recruitment of Darré that emerges from the
correspondence in his Nachlass.

Professor H. Haushofer, Mein Leben als Agrarier (Munich, 1982), p.
53. There is an interesting account of his first contact with Darré
and work with him, in pages 53-61 and 74-77.

Ernst Hanfstaengl, mentioned by Lehmann to Darré, 8.12.31, NDG/
87a. See Hanfstaengl, Hitler: the missing Years (London, 1957), p-
183. His highly coloured memoirs, written for the American
market, claim Rosenberg was at least ‘half-Jewish’, and Strasser
and Streicher both ‘looked Jewish to me’: his argument is that only
Jews could propound anti-semitism so vehemently and successfully,
pp- 80-1. Class and von Herzberg, see Lehmann to Darré, 5.11.30,
NDG/87a.

L. and J. Stone An open Elite? (London, 1984), and for the volatile
land market in East Prussia, see I. Morrow, The Peace Settlement in
the German-Polish Borderlands (London, 1936), p. 260.

231

Notes to pages 81-86

32.

33.

34.

35.

232

W. Abel, Agrarpolitik (Göttingen, 1967), pp. 250, 253, and F..
Hennig, Landwirtschaft und landliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland, 1750-
1956 (Paderborn, 1978), vol 2, p. 149. For a more detailed analysis,
see my thesis, Bramwell, ‘National Socialist Agrarian Theory and
Practice’, chapters I and IV.

Farquharson, Plough and Swastika, chapters I and III, and H.
Fallada, Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben (Berlin 1931), for a good
contemporary account.

W. Clauss, ‘Erfahrungen aus 50 Jahres Agrarpolitik’, unpub. paper
given to Schleswig-Holstein Bauernverband, 14.7.79, p. 4, and D.
Gessner, Agrarverbände in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf, 1976),
pp. 23 ff, personal interest rates were 9-12%.

W. Dawson, The Evolution of Modern Germany (London, 1919), p.

256, quotes Freiherr von Wangenheim, the head of the Agrarian
League, as calling for state intervention to prevent the private sale
and division of estates.

. Salomon, Fragebogen, p. 255.
. See R. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler (Princeton, 1982), pp. 38-9,

40-1.

. See NDG 140, 141, 142, 143, for the memoranda.

. Quoted in Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler, p- 7.

. Hans Wehdt, Hitler Regiert (Berlin, 1935), pp. 86-7.

. ‘Black blood’, Darré’s diary, 15.12.33. Marie Adelheid to Charly

Darré on Goebbels’ pamphlet ‘attacking the Rassenarbeit of our
friends,’ 6.10.31, NDG/87a.

. Darré to Konopath, re Strasser, Goebbels and Himmler, undated

letter of August 1930, NDG/87b.

. Farquharson, Plough and Swastika, p. 18.
. Report of AD activity in Saxony, 1.1.31 to 1.1.32, NDG/140.
. Hans-Jirgen Riecke, ‘Memoirs’, unpub. MS deposited in the

Coblenz Federal Archives, p. 47.

. AD Report on Saxony, NDG/140.
. Darré’s diary, 18.12.31.
. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler, p. 27, and see E. Fröhlich and M. Bros-

zat, ‘Politische und soziale Macht auf dem Lande, VjhfZg (1977).

. Darré’s diary, 6.9.32.
. AD Report to Darré, 28.2.33, NDG/140. The Raiffeisen Co-

operatives remain a neglected subject in English. Started in the mid
nineteenth century, they flourished largely in Catholic areas, and
were independent of State funding, unlike the Schultz-Delitsch co-
operatives. :

51.

52.

53.

54.
55.

56.

. Abraham, Collapse ofthe Weimar Republic, pp. 214-5.
58.

59.
60.

61.

Notes to pages 87-89

Statistische Jahrbuch (1934), p. 63.

E.g., Eduard David, Sozialismus und Landwirtschaft (Leipzig, 1903),
and see his running battle with Kautsky’s more typically Marxist
opposition to small farmers, ‘Kritische Bemerkungen zu Kautskys
Agrarfrage’, Neue Zeit, 1890-1900. David Abraham’s two chapters
on agriculture in the Weimar republic, in the Collapse of the
Weimar Republic present an interesting but controversial Marxist
interpretation of the issue, marred by turgid jargon, and the use of
Landwirtschaft and Fraktion as if they were English words. David
Mitrany, Marx Aginst the Peasants (North Carolina, 1951), is a
splendid and irreplaceable study of Marxism and the agrarian
question in Europe. K. Tribe and A. Hussein, however, in Marxism

and the Agrarian Question (London, 1981), vol I, claim, in a lucid |

but Jesuitical argument, that David is more representative of the
Marxist tradition.

See Bramwell, ‘Small Farm Productivity under the Nazis,’ Oxford
Agrarian Studies, XIII (1984).

E.g., Rundschreiben no. 59, 10.7.31, NDG/142.

Neuadel, pp. 24-5, and see reference to Habicht, Darré to Alma
from Saaleck, 28.34.30, ED 110/10.

See page 232, n. 35.

Rundschreiben no. 59, 10.7.31, NDG/142. One memo. c. 1938,
from a farmer to the Reichschancellery, opposing RNS legislation,
presented an almost Hayekian argument in favour of ‘the will and
strength of private initiative, and against bureaucracies, committees
and directives’, in BA NS 10/104.

Sondern Rundschreiben, 9.11.31, NDG/142.

Behrens to von Schleicher, 27.1.33, BA R4311/210; von Fleming,
President of the National Agricultural Chamber, to von Schleicher,
16.1.33 and 17.1.33, and Darré to von Schleicher, 13.1.33, both BA
R43]I/192. Von Schleicher placed a quarter of a million marks at
their disposal, 25.1.33. See the two telegrams, East Prussian head of
organisation of German handworkers to von Schleicher, 13.1.33,
BA R43I1/192. The minutes of a meeting between the National
Agricultural Chamber, the Reichslandbund and the Ministries of
Economy and Agriculture discussed the need. for emergency
measures to combat possible famine among farmers and a fear of
‘Communist terrorism.’ 11.1.33, BA R43II/192.

Bramwell, ‘National Socialist Agrarian Theory and Practice’, p. 171.

62. The SS reference is in Sondern Rundschreiben, 19.1.33, NDG/140.

233

Notes to pages 90-95

63.

65.

. See pages 134, 241,

See on the early SS, the excellent new study by R.L. Koehl, The
Black Corps (Wisconsin, 1983).

Darré’s diary, 20.2.32. For the text of the SS marriage laws of 1931,
see Appendix. See also Darré’s affidavit on the SS for the TWCN,
Case 8, and his note on the affidavit, written December 1950 at
Bad Harzburg, copies in author’s possession.

n. 23. For Nazi-Indian links, see the
comprehensive study by Milan Hauner, India in Axis Strategy
(London, 1982).

Darré and Himmler made a pilgrimage together to Saxon graves in
1934: surprisingly, Röhm accompanied them, Cecil, Myth of the
Master Race, p. 96.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

1. D. Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution (New York, 1966), p
168.

2. A. Schweitzer, ‘Depression and War’, Political Science Quarterly
(Sept., 1947), p. 332.

3. Goebbels, Diaries, (ed. Louis Lochner, New York, 1948), p. 165;
Grundmann, Agrarpolitik, p. 156; Farquharson, Plough and Swastika,

. 229,

4. A. Dallin, German Rule in Russia 1941-5 (London, 1957), pp. 39-
40, 304-319.

5. R. Koehl, RKFDV: German Resettlement and Population Policy 1939-
45 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 29; A. Speer, Inside the Third Reich
(New York, 1970), p. 627.

6. H. Backe to Ursula Backe, his wife, 20.8.36, BA NL75 Micr.

7. Backe, ‘Disposition’, notes written in prison im 1946, copy in
author’s possession by courtesy of Frau Backe.

8. Grosser Bericht (Backe’s memoirs, written in prison in 1946, and
hereafter referred to as G.B.), BA NL75/10, p. 2.

9. G.B., p. 1.

10. Dr Ludolf Haase, ‘Aufstand in Niedersachsen’ (mimeographed,
1942), chapter 86.

11. J. Noakes, The Nazi Party in Lower Saxony, 1919-1933 (Oxford,
1971), pp. 22-5.

12. Haase, ‘Aufstand’, p. 651.

13. "Wirksamkeit der Skalden’, c. 1936, BA NL94II/49, and cf. Pulzer,
Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, p. 322. l

14. Interview with Frau Backe, January, 1980.

15. Noakes, The Nazi Party in Lower Saxony, pp. 22, 36.

234

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.
23.

24.

Notes to pages 95-98

Haase, ‘Aufstand’, p. 659. Backe was arrested in June 1923 for bill-
posting, and delivered caustic speeches at the police station,
comparing his treatment with that in Russia. But the timing of the
arrest was fortunate. The inflation enabled him to pay a heavy fine
of 16,500 marks within weeks, BA NL75 Micr. police papers and
copy of bill, Haase, ‘Aufstand’, pp. 257, 257a. The view on Russia
held by Backe was common in the circle round Die Tat, the neo-
Conservative, vélkisch journal to which Backe subscribed. Backe was
a friend of Ferdinand Fried Zimmerman, economist and journalist,
and later a Nazi publicist. Dr Giselher Wirsing, another Die Tat
writer, and later Nazi intellectual, stressed the concept of
Zwischeneuropa—Germany’s influence should extend into Russia.
See Klemens von Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism
(Princeton, 1957), pp. 130-4, 205; Zimmerman to Backe, 30.4.36,
BA NL75/10; Report by Dr Wirsing, end 1942, “Westlicher
Imperialismus oder deutsche Ordnung im Osten’, BA R7/2243.
Speech to the Worker and Middleclass Union, Göttinger Tageblatt,
17.1.23.

G. Stoakes, “The Evolution of Hitler’s Ideas on Foreign Policy,
1919-1925’, The Shaping of the Nazi State, ed. P. Stachura
(London, 1978).

Backe’s speech, “The Foreign Policy Aims of the Young German
Order’, early 1925, BA NL75/6. Backe’s rejected thesis was to be
published in 1942. Noakes, ‘Conflict and Development’, p. 25,
suggests that 1925 plans for eastern expansion and development
submitted to a conference of the Göttingen branch’of the NSDAP
were by Backe, and ‘read like a blueprint for later SS policy’;
however, Backe appears to have cut his connection with the
NSDAP by this time, and did not attend the conference. See also
G.B., p. 40.

Speech, and notes for speech, c. 1925, BA NL75/5. Haase and
Fobke criticised Strasser’s 1925 programme for its urban and
parliamentary emphasis, BA NS26/896.

Haase, ‘Aufstand’, p. 644, and cf. Lane and Rupp, Nazi Ideology,
pp. xiii, xviii.

Ibid. oe

Halford Mackinder, the English geographer, appears to have
inspired German geo-politicians, and in Democratic Ideals and
Reality, first published in 1919, the reprinted version (New York,
1942), referred to the use made of it by General Karl Haushofer.
Darré to Backe, 12.8.31, Backe to Darré, 23.8.32, Darré to Backe,

235

Notes to pages 99-106

25.
26.

27.

29.

30.

31.

32.

41.

42.
43.

44.

236

12.9.31, and see G.B., p. 11. letters in Frau Backe’s possession. See
‘Volk and Landwirtschaft’, 1931, and ‘Deutsche Bauer Erwache’,
1934, for Backe’s response to Darré’s influence.

Darré’s post-war account, BA NL941/28.

G.B., pp. 4, 11, pp. 20-30. Hitler’s speech printed in M. Domarus’
Hitler; Reden und Proklamation 1932-45 (Munich, 1965), p. 60.

Backe to Frau Backe, 5.4.33, BA NL75 Micr.

. Postcard, 2.1.33, BA NL75 Micr. BA NL75/6, G.B., p. 12.

Darré’s diary, 20.4.33; J. Heinemann, ‘The Resignation of
Hugenberg’, JMH, 41 (1969), describes Hitler’s manoeuvre, and see
also J. Leopold’s interesting biography of Hugenberg, Alfred
Hugenberg; the Radical Nationalist Campaign against the Weimar
Republic (Yale, 1978).

See Grundmann, Agrarpolitik, pp. 60-2; Farquharson, Plough and
Swastika, p. 68, 52, G.B., p. 14, A. Schweitzer, Big Business in the
Third Reich (Bloomington, 1964), p. 197. Von Rohr’s criticisms are
in 8.4.33, NDG/143.

8.4.33, BA R43I1/192, and Backe to Frau Backe, 21.3.33, BA
NL75 Micr.
Darré’s telegram to Hitler, 16.4.33, BA R4311/192, and H. Kehrl,
Krisenmanager im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf, 1971), p. 49, on Darré’s
suitability for the post.

‘Hugenberg belongs to the year 1900’, commented Darré sourly in
his diary, 20.4.33.

. Grundmann, Agrarpolitik, pp. 34, 36.

. Ibid.

. Ibid., note on p. 169.

. Darré’s diary, 10.4.33; Backe to Frau Backe, 3.5.33, BA NL75

Micr.,

. Darré’s diary, 18.5.33, and interview with Frau Backe, 14.4.84.

. See pages 107-8.
. Backe to Frau Backe, 6.9.33, BA NL75 Micr., and 24. 10. 34, Frau

Backe’s diary.

The photo album with the pictures of Goslar is in Frau Backe’s
possession. The personal files are kept at the Federal Archives,
Coblenz.

Backe to Frau Backe, 6.9.33, BA NL75 Micr.

The annotated copy of the RGB is in Backe’s microfilmed papers.
See also Frau Backe’s diary, 14.10.33, and Darré’s diary, 29.9.33.
Giirtner to Lammers, BA R43II/193, discusses the legislation.
Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution, chs. 1, 8, 9.

57.
58.

59.

60.

Notes to pages 107-112

R.W. Darré, ‘Ostelbia’, repr. in Blut und Boden (Munich, 1941),
20.5.33, BA R4311/192, Haushofer, Ideengeschichte, p. 275, and
Farquharson, Plough and Swastika, p. 203. -

. Backe to Frau Backe, 14.10.33, BA NL75 Micr.

. See Schweitzer, Big Business, pp. 165, 167.

. Meeting with Hitler, G.B. p. 38, Frau Backe’s diary, 17.7.34.

. See report on food supply and agricultural prices, 18.9.36, BA

NS10/54, and report on agricultural income, Institute of Economic
Research report, 1936, BA R4311/194. Dr T. W. Mason argues that
official figures do not reflect the true rise in retail food prices,
‘National Socialist Policies towards the Working Classes’, Oxford
D. Phil Thesis, 1971, pp. 169-172. Statistics are in St. Jb. fd.
deutsches Reich, cited in Tracy, Agriculture in Western Europe, p. 207,
and see Guillebaud, The Economic Recovery of Germany, p. 155, Frick’s
21 reports, 24.7.35 and 2.8.34, on fats prices, in BA R4311/193.

. Frau Backe’s diary, 17.7.34.
. Backe’s meeting with Ley, Dr Krohn, and the Trustees of Labour,

27.8.34, see BA R4311/318.

. Goering’s attack, 31.8.34, BA R43II/193; Goebbels on Winterhilfe,

15.12.33, Darré’s rebuttal, 17.1.34 and 28.3.34, BA R43]I/1143.

. Farquharson, Plough and Swastika, p. 100.

. Backe to Frau Backe, 5.7.35, BA NL75 Micr.

. Ibid., 2.8.36, BA NL75 Micr., G.B., pp. 13-20.

. See Hitler Decree, 4.4.36, BA R26 1/35, G. Thomas, Geschichte der

deutschen Wehr-und Rüstungswirtschaft, 1918-1943-5 (Coblenz, 1966),
pp. 111, 124, 15.5.36, BA R261/36, and minutes of meeting on
raw materials and currency, nineteen ministers present, 4.5.36, BA
NL75/9; Backe to Lammers concerning Backe’s membership of the
committee, 15.6.36, BA R4311/208, Parchmann to Backe, 10.5.38,
BA NL75/10, and notice of 6.7.36, BA R26/I/1a, Darré’s comment
on Körner, 25.8.41, BA NL9411/20.

Schweitzer, Big Business, p. 200.

Backe’s notes on his meeting with Goering, summer 1936, BA
NL75/5, and Frau Backe’s diary, 25.11.36.

Backe to Frau Backe, 25.11.36, BA NL75 Micr. Darré’s diary does
not record a talk with Himmler at this time.

See unintentionally hilarious account in BA R16/2141,
correspondence August 1935. The KBF refused to stop repeating
the allegations, despite repeated roughing up by party officials.
Darre's warning about Die Tat’s Masonic connections,

Rundschreiben 110, 19.12.31, NDG/142.

Notes to pages 112-121 |

51. 1.11.36, NDG/483. Goering had circulated the national leadership
for their views on Germany’s economic situation.

52. For example, Darré always insisted on being addressed in writing as
R. Walther Darré, never Richard, much less Ricardo Darré.
According to him, this was to avoid confusion with his father,
while his father lived. According to his colleagues, it was to
emphasise the name ‘Walther’ (etymologically close to the German
word ‘to rule’) rather than ‘Ricardo’, with its Latinate origins. He
became known to many of his peers as ‘R punkt Walther’.

53. Hitler’s speech, quoted in Landpost, 18.9.36, in NDG/315. See
Backe to Frau Backe, 10.9.36, BA NL75 Micr, and Darré’s diary,
4.2.38; Körner to Backe, 7.9.36, BA NL75/8.

54. G.B., pp. 17, 21, 46.

55. See Molkerei-Zeitung, 20.8.36. Backe to Frau Backe, 12.5.37,

discusses Goering, BA NL75 Micr.

56. Backe to Frau Backe, 20.8.36, BA NL75 Micr.

57. Darré on meeting of 3.2.37, 16.2.37, NDG/137. See also Darré’s
diary, 5.2.37.

58. Darré’s memos to Lammers on these subjects are surprisingly clear
and well argued. See, e.g., BA R43II/611.

59. G.B., p. 20.

70. Interview with Frau Backe, 14.4.84.

71. Backe’s complaint about Darré in 1940, see Frau Backe’s diary,
19.6.40. See also Haushofer, Ideengeschichte, pp. 270-1. See chapter
Eight for a discussion of Darré’s campaign for organic farming.

72. See chapter Six, Darré’s diary, 30.7.37, and his memorandum to
Goering, protesting about the effects of the Pact, 29.9.39, BA
NL94I1/20.

73. 1.4.38 and 16.3.39, Darré’s diary, 1.4.38 and 16.3.39.

74. For the peasant settlement issue, see Bramwell, ‘National Socialist
Agrarian Theory and Practice,’ Chapter V.

/5. See Darré’s memorandum, calling for fewer imports. of Polish
labourers, 16.11.39, BA R2/31089, and his diary, 30.7.37. Dr
Mason’s comment is in his Sozialpolitik im Dritten Reich (Opladen,
1977), pp. 228. See also pp. 158-9.

76. Kehrl, Krisenmanager, p. 82. Hitler’s complaint was reported by
Eggeling, then Keeper of the Seal at Goslar, in a file note 7.4.37,
BA R16/2222.

7/7. Darré’s diary, 3.5.38. :

/8. See FKG, Reichsgesetzblatt 3 (1938), pp. 825-32, G.B., p. 35, but cf.
D. Schoenbaum, ‘Class and Status in the Third Reich’, Oxford D.

238

79.
80.
81.
. 1943, see Backe’s draft for a speech in Pomerania, 12.7.43, BA

Notes to pages 122-127

Phil. Thesis (1964), who argues that the estates were mostly forest
anyway, and estate ownership hardly affected by the FKG.

Darré’s diary, 4.3.39, and G.B., pp. 35-45. For the draft new
Ministry, see Darré’s diary, 31.1.39.

See chapter Six, and, for Backe’s criticisms of Germany’s sloth, his
draft ‘Testament’, 1946.

See pages 96-7.

. NL75/9, and his jottings, c. 1943, BA NL75/10. For the refusal of

83.

85.

86.

87.
88.

89.

permission for his wife to travel, see Backe to Frau Backe, 4.10.44,
BA NL75 Micr.

10.1.41, Frau Backe’s diary. See also G.B., pp. 39 and 46, and
Grundmann, Agrarpolitik, pp. 73-4. Secrecy from Darré, see
Farquharson, Plough and Swastika, p. 247, and ‘Row with Darré
over secrecy of Russian preparations’, Frau Backe’s diary, 27.6.41.

. Darré warned Backe against Bormann, G.B., pp. 39-40; for Darré’s

attitude to Bormann, see J. von Lang, The Secretary; Martin
Bormann, the Man who Manipulated Hitler (New York, 1979), pp.
51-2.

Erich Dwinger, Die 12 Gespräche, 1933-1945 (Germany, 1966), pp.
50-54.

Darré’s letter to Backe, 14.3.41, BA NL75/10, Frau Backe’s diary,
5.12.39 and 19.6.40. Hitler’s request is mentioned in Frau Backe’s
diary, 28.10.40.

Backe to Frau Backe, 8.4.41, BA NL75 Micr.

See G. ae Heydrich, the Pursuit of Total Bower (London,
1981), p. 286, who also makes the point about Heydrich and
Backe, For Hayler, see Backe to Frau Backe, 15.11.43, BA NL75
Micr, and Hayler to Frau Backe, 10.4.44 and 30.4.44, BA NL75/
10. See also interview with Frau Backe, July 1981.

Moritz’ file note of Darré’s phone call, 30.8.41, BA R14/371, Darré’s
accusation that Backe was falsifying the figures, 29.8.39, Darré’s
diary, and Albrecht to Briickner (a Hitler adjutant) on Darré’s attack
on the figures, 1.6.40, BA NS10/107. Backe’s report on European
food self-sufficiency is in BA NS10/107.

. Frau Backe’s diary, 5.11.41. Cf. Brandt, Fortress Bione p. 131, on

the Germans’ failure to find vast grain reserves in Russia. For the
withdrawal in 1943, see Brandt, op. cit., pp. 148-9, and Backe to
Lammers, 9.4.44, BA R4311/614. For the frozen potato harvest, see
report from Danzig to Reich Chancellery, 16.12.41, BA R43ll/
863.

239

Notes to pages 130-132

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX

win

10.

11.

12.

240

. K.R. Schultz-Klinken,

R. Cecil, Rosenberg, The Myth of a Master Race ondon 1968),
pp. 119-20 and passim for an interesting account of the links
between Rosenberg, Darré and Himmler. Cecil considers that Darré
was a potent influence on Himmler in the early ‘30s, awakening long-
dead enthusiasm for the soil and for settlement. I. Ackermann,
in Heinrich Himmler als Ideologe (Göttingen, 1970), thinks that
Himmler’s early interest in eastern settlement affected Darré. How-
ever, this may have been over-estimated as a factor in Himmler’s
early ideology. Darré wrote his books before meeting Himmler.

. 19.1.38, Darré’s diary.
. L Kershaw, ‘The Führer Image and Political age 4 in ed. .
Hirschfield, G., and Kettenacker, L., Der Führerstaat; Mythos und

Realität (Stuttgart, 1980), estimates that some 80 per cent of
Germans continued to support Hitler, if not the Nazi party, up to
1944. Although Mein Kampf was a best seller, not many buyers
read it all the way through.

. See BA NS2/108 and NS2/85.
. The estimated 11.5 million ethnic Germans living in Europe

outside the boundaries of the Altreich, Sering, Agrarverfassung, p. lv.

. St. Jb. (1941), and Landesbauernschaft in Zahlen (1938-44).
. K. Meyer,

‘Lebensbericht’
possession), p. 95.

(unpub. MS., 1970, in author’s

. Kummer’s doctoral dissertation of 1919 concerned Eastern

settlement. The Archive for Internal Colonisation was founded in
1908 by Prof. H. Sohnrey, who later edited Neues Bauerntum.
Quote from Meyer, ‘Lebensbericht’, pp. 108-9.

‘Preussische und deutsche Ost-
siedlungspolitik von 1886-1945, Ihre Zielvorstellungen,
Entwicklungsplan und Ergebnisse’, ZAGAS, 21 (1973), 198-215.
‘Die Ansiedlung deutscher Bauern in den eingegliederten
Ostgebieten’, Vortrag by Prof. Dr Otto Auhagen, undated, BA
R49/20, and see p. 139, this chapter. Fischer, F., Griff nach der
Weltmacht (Düsseldorf, 1967), pp. 104-5, 138-9, 142-3, 234-5, cited
by Farquharson, Plough and Swastika, p. 257.

See Broszat, Martin, NS Polenpolitik 1939-45 (Stuttgart, 1961), pp.
13-16, and Rich, N., Hitler’s War Aims, ii, (London, 1974), pp.
70-71.

E.g. see correspondence between Pancke, head of RuSHA after
Darré’s resignation, and General von dem Bach in Breslau in
November 1939, which discussed at length the bad relations

13.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

Notes to pages 133-134

between the SS and the Gauleiters of Silesia, West Prussia and the
Warthegau, who had complained about the SS to Hitler, 27.11.39,
and later correspondence, BA NS2/60. See also attacks on SS plans
to form land units by the SA in 1937, BA NS2/290.

L. Wheeler, ‘The SS and the Administration of Nazi Occupied
Europe 1938-1945" (Oxford D. Phil. thesis, 1981), ‘Although Darré
was removed from his post by Himmler in 1938, the RuSHA
which had developed under his auspices was a powerful
component of the Reichführer’s network’, p. 27. This became true in
1940-41, but by 1943 the RuSHA had lost its importance: it was
certainly not all powerful in 1938.

. R. Koehl, RKFDV; German Resettlement Policy, 1939-45 (Harvard,

1957).

. RK26272 B, Führer Decree, 7.10.39, BA R49/1 and 4.
. See Wheeler, ‘The SS’, pp. 12-17, 20, on the administration of the

RKFDV.

. Backe, G.B., p. 46.
. See Loewenberg, P., “The Unsuccessful Adolescence of Heinrich

Himmler’, AHR (1971), and the subsequent criticism by Novak,
Steven J., AHR (1972). Despite ‘the careful scholarship of Smith
and Angress and Ackerman ... it has not been possible so far to
identify the political ideas of Heinrich Himmler before 1933’. Lane
and Rupp, Nazi Ideology, p. 156.

Himmler to Darré, enclosing a draft order referring to the first SS
settler selection camps set up in December 1935, 30.4.36, BA NS2/
50. See also Darré to Himmler on 30.4.36, BA NL94 11/49.

18.12.37, Darré’s diary.

See pp. 141-145, this chapter. Backe warned Darré in 1938 that

‘Himmler was anxious to take over settlement activity, G.B., p. 40.

Report of speech by Himmler, marked ‘Secret; E.P. Madrid’,
20.10.40, BA R49/20.

‘I intend to fight and settle ... some day, far from lovely
Germany’ (Himmler’s Diary, 11.11.19). Not much is known of
Himmler’s life between 1924-30. His 1922 plan to emigrate to
Turkey never re-emerged, but he befriended Indian nationalists
who were studying in Germany during the 1920s. See BA NS19
neu/622, 1068, 1812. See correspondence 1924-30 with Taraknath
Das, Indian revolutionary, in Georgetown University, Washington.
For the emigration to Turkey plan, see the comment in Angress
and Smith, ‘Diaries of Heinrich Himmler’s early years’, JMH, 31
(1959), 206-225.

241

Notes to pages 134-137

24.
25.
26.

39.

242

E.g. Ackermann, Himmler als Ideologe.

See Meyer, ‘Lebensbericht’, p. 108. .

Eggeling to Himmler, 23.10.40, BA NL75/10. Eggeling sent a
copy to Backe. Darré had written in 1939, ‘Now I cannot look
after the peasantry’s interests any more. Among the rural
population this will presumably make me neither renowned nor
loved. I can only hope that History will justify me to the
grandchildren of today’s peasants’, 13.5.39, Darré’s diary.

. See Haushofer, Ideengeschichte, p. 313, 2.2.40, Darré’s diary, and

whole file, BA NL94 I/1d.

. E.g. 7.9.40, BA NS10/37, and BA R4311/646b, pp. 52-3.
. Given in full in the Appendix.
. RFSS Order on the formation and membership of RuSHA, in BA:

NS2/99 and NS2/1, pp. 3-4. Details of the education courses for
young SS leaders are in BA NS2/108. Himmler requested that
educational programmes should be ‘soldierly, not dry, academic
stuff ... geography, history or racial education, recognition of
enemies (Gegner), Freemasons, Catholics, etc.’, 4.10.37, BA NS2/
85. Oddly enough, the list of opponents did not include Jews.
Darré’s younger brother Erich attended the courses, and by 1937
was SS SBF in the RuSHA library department, 23.3.37, BA NS2/
100.

. BA NS2/99.

. BA NS2/100.

. Bulletin for 1934-5, BA NS2/1.

. Order dated 15.10.34, BA NS2/99. Himmler took the rune from

Odal, the title of Darré’s journal.

. The introduction to the RuSHA file at the Federal Archives,

Coblenz gives the office’s history.

. Himmler to Dr Reischle, 12.3.39, BA NS2/66.
. M. Kater, ‘Die Ahnenerbe’, VjhfZg (1974).
. In Case 8 of the TWCN the RuSHA was charged with

expropriating all enemy and Jewish property in areas occupied by
German troops. However, the papers that have survived seem to
concern straightforward purchase and settlement procedures in the
incorporated areas, the Danubian plain, the Alps, Lorraine and
other ‘Germanised’ areas. The usual instrument was the DAG,
Germany’s largest settlement society, takem over by the SS in 1938.
see p. 141 above.

See e.g. Darré’s circular to the NSDAP AD in 19.1.31, where he
informed his members that the SS was asking for volunteers,

40.

41.

45.
46.
47.
48.

49.

Notes to pages 137-140

NDG/140. Backe described ‘honorary’ 'SS membership as
compulsory for all LBFs after 1933, G.B., p. 36. Dr R. Proksch,
ex-Artamanen leader, confirmed this question of cross-membership
in correspondence, adding that ‘underlings were not encouraged to `
join the SS’.

C. Snyder, The History of the Death’s Head Battalion 1933-45
(Princeton, 1977). Kummer and Willikens were both in fighting
units in France, 1940-1.

Two weeks before the Night of the Long Knives, Darré wrote to
Röhm, Head of the SA, enclosing copies of correspondence
between Darré and the Chief of the SA leadership office, asking
Röhm whether he approved of the SA letters, which contained ‘a
multitude of complaints on agricultural questions by the SA—
unhappy with the RNS handling of settlement ...’ and which
asked Darré to discuss the complaints with the SA agricultural
adviser. 24.5.34, BA R43I1/207.

. 20.12.35, BA NS2/137.
. RFSS to Darr& as Bauernführer, 30.4.36, BA NS2/50.
. J. von Lang, The Secretary, p. 84. Backe personally warned Darré in

1938 that Himmler had his eye on the RMEL’s Settlement
Department, G.B., pp. 40-1.

E.g. Darré to Himmler, 30.4.36 and 12.5.36, BA NL94 11/49.
22.12.36, BA NS2/50.

Undated letter, Himmler to RuSHA, BA NS2/50.

Himmler to Dr Schmidt, RuSHA Settlement Office, 5.3.37, BA
NS2/50. Kummer to SS Oberabschnitt Nord, 25.11.37, BA NS26/
944. He added pointedly in his letter: ‘In my report to the RFSS I
will certainly make favourable references to this comradely help’.
Kummer to SS Oberabschnitt Nord, 25.11.37, BA NS26/944.
Copies of the application form are in BA NS2/45. 3500 to 4500
RM was needed for a deposit on a farm and also livestock: cf.
Farquharson, Plough and Swastika, p. 150, who mentions c. 15,000
RM as a minimum.

. Letter from Kummer and Professor Emil Wörmann to Himmler,

27.11.37, BA NS26/944.

. See Hofmann to RFSS on the problems involved with admitting

Kreisbauernführer into the SS, 16.12.40, BA NS2/56.

. Kummer to Himmler (my underlining), 27.11.37, BA NS26/944.

. Pancke to Himmler, 10.8.38, BA NS2/54.

. Circular from Darré as head of RuSHA, 14.12.37, BA NS2/163.

. Undated memorandum, probably late 1937, concerning an SS

243

Notes to pages 140-143

56.
57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

62.

65.

66.
67.

69.
70.

71.

244

village settlement, which described procedures in a camp for
selecting SS settlers, BA NS2/137.

SS OSF Klumm to Himmler’s Chief Adjutant, 7.11.36, BA NS2/290.
NSDAP Gauleitung Swabia to NSDAP Kreisleitung Günzburg,
asking the latter to support the SS recruitment drive, 4.2.39, BA
NS2/290.

SA Führung circular, re Training of SS Agricultural cadres, 3.4.37,
BA NS2/290.

Farquharson, Plough & Swastika, p. 153, estimates that 90 per cent
of the Verfiigungstrappe had been brought up on the land. See
Wegner, Bernd, ‘Das Fiihrerkorps der Bewaffneten SS 1933-1945’
(Diss. Phil., Hamburg Universitat, 1980), for a contrary view.

The Wehrmachtlehrgüter. Draft proposals for Ausbildung der SS Männer
als Siedlungsanwärter, 6.1.41, BA NS2/56.

Ideally, for the SS, he would be under 35, son of a peasant or
agricultural labourer. See Farquharson Plough and Swastika, p. 159.
Only thirteen per cent of settlers in 1938 were under 30. Seventy
per cent were aged between 40 and 50.

See correspondence between Eggeling (the Keeper of the Seal for
the RNS), and Goering, concerning Meinberg and Granzow’s
attempted putsch, 7.4.37, BA R16/2222, and Gies, Prof. H., ‘Der
Fall Meinberg’, unpub. seminar paper, April 1981.

. Pancke to Himmler, 10.8.38, BA NS2/54.
. See E. Georg,

Die Wirtschaftlichen Unternehmungen der SS
(Stuttgart, 1963), pp. 133-4. See Darré to Himmler, 20.9.39, BA
NS2/55.

Undated draft of letter, from von Gottberg to Darré in reply to
Darré’s letter of 20.9.39, BA NS2/55.

RKFDV, p. 242.

Pancke to Himmler suggested using the DAG for resettlement
because the OKW had a good opinion of them, 20.11.39, BA
NS2/60.

. Correspondence and minutes of the DRV, 22.7.39 to 8.3.40, pp. 3

and 4, BA NS2/257.

May 1939, BA R43I1/233a.

In October 1938 Darré wrote to Lammers after visiting the
Bayerische Ostmark (Western Czechoslovakia) on the need for
urgent aid measures for the mountain peasants there. BA R43ll/
202a. See also 7.10.38, BA NS10/36.

Darré corresponded secretly with Heinz Haushofer, then attached to
the Austrian Ministry of Agriculture, who reported to Darré on the

Notes to pages 143-146

degree of support existing there for Darréan ideas, 6.3.38, BA
NS35/11.

. Lammers to Darré, 8.5.39, BA R43II/223a. .
. Koehl, RKFDYV, pp. 40-2 and 44-8.
. The Sudetenland was annexed on 1.10.38 and Henlein appointed

Reichskommissar. Rich, Hitlers War Aims, ii, 21. It was declared a

= Reichsgau on 30.10.38. The transfer of population agreement was

85.

. Meyer,

signed on 20.11.38 and concerned Czechs and Germans who had
moved to their present homes after 1910. Older residents had a
right of option. According to Kochl, RKFDV, pp. 40-3, Germans
were told to stay within the rump Czech state to provoke the
Czechs, but neither German nor Czech minorities were disturbed.
However, correspondence between a Czech co-operative and the
Reich Chancellery in June 1939 mentions unfulfilled promises
regarding their freedom of assembly and trade, and complains of
‘harsh measures ... and bitterness among the local population’. BA
R4311/221, and see Rich, Hitler’s War Aims, i, 111-21.

. Pancke to Himmler, 7.10.38, BA NS2/54.

. BA R14/267.

. Lammers File note, RK 211898, October 1938, BA R4311/208.

. Rich, Hitler’s War Aims, ii, 55.

. TWCN, 14, p. 697.

. Darre’s diary, 26.11.39.

. Darre’s diary, 15.8.39. Czechoslovakia was occupied on 15.3.39.

Rich, Hitler’s War Aims, ii, 27.

. 17.5.39, Darré’s diary, Pancke’s notes, 17.5.39, BA NS2/138.
; Pancke’s file notes,

3.2.39. A letter from Pancke to Kummer,
25.8.39, accused the latter of disloyalty and indiscipline, BA NS2/
138. `

‘Lebensbericht’, pp. 103-4. Himmler drove him to
Cracow, while telling him to the plan to resettle the Volksdeutsche
in the Warthegau, deporting the Poles to Restpolen, and warning
Meyer that he would ‘probably have difficulties with Darré’.
Himmler drove rather slowly, complaining of careless driving by
others, while his adjutant fed them bread and cognac from the
back. Meyer was unable to convey his own excitement to Darré,
who threw.a pen at him on his return, with the remark ‘Where
matters of belief are concerned, you should go and see Rosenberg’.
Ibid., p. 104. See, for Meyer’s role as planning expert in Berlin in
1937-39, BA R4311/232, p. 220.

Darre’s diary, 27.10.39.

245

Notes to pages 146-152

86.
87.

88.

See discussion, pp. 188-9 above and TWCN, xiv, 558-63. -

Darré to Lammers, 29.9.39, BA R43]]/613. The book was Wilhelm
Rauber’s Bodenrecht als politisches Gestaltungsmittel: Gedanken zur
Geschichte Irlands.

Bergmann attacks Darré as a reactionary Imperialist over this issue,
alleging that he ‘legitimises his imperialism with national-Darwinist
arguments’, Bergmann, Agrarromantik, p. 308. The offending
passage reads: “The ethic of Blut und Boden gives us the moral
right to take [back] as much Eastern land as is necessary to achieve
harmony between the body of our people and geo-political space’,
Stellung und Aufgabe. As Darré habitually referred to East Prussia

and the Baltic coast as the ‘East’ this passage does not seem to me |

to bear the weight placed on it by Bergmann, who seems to invent
a passage in ‘Innere Kolonisation’ (Darré, 1926) to emphasise his
point, pp. 308-9. See also Milan Hauner, cited p. 228, above.

. Darré’s diary, 19.1.38 and 11.9.38.
. Darré to Himmler, 16.10.39, NDG/483.
. Koehl, RKFDV, p. 28. Grundman, Agrarpolitik, pp. 73-4, describes

how Darré’s opposition to Himmler was not taken seriously by Hitler.

. Darré’s diary, 16.3.39.

. Farquharson, Plough and Swastika, Ch. 11.

. Darré’s notes, NDG/182.

. RMEL acknowledgement of decree to Schwerin-Krosigk, 16.10.39,

NDG/483.

. Darré to Lammers, 4.10.39, NDG/483.

. Darré to Himmler, 16.10.39, NDG/483.

. Himmler to Darré, 29.10.39, NDG/483.

. See Koehl, RKFDV, Brandt, Fortress Europe, and Hans Merkel,

communication to the author, 5.5.82.

NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN

2.
3.

246

Willikens, State Secretary, RMEL, to Himmler, 23.11.39, with
copies to Goering, Lammers, Winkler, the OKW, the Finance
Ministry, the Danzig civil administration, Gustav Behrens
(Reichsobmann) and Dr Reischle of the RNS. My underlining, BA
NS26/943.

See Brozsat, NS Polenpolitik, pp. 85-100, on Nahplan 1, 2 and 3.

The term ‘slave labour’ will be avoided in this discussion; it seems

wm eA

10.
11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.
17.

Notes to pages 152-154

to the writer that some form of barracks and/or curfew has to be
in existence before workers can be termed ‘slaves’. See discussions ~
between RNS, Kaltenbrunner and Müller: RNS representatives
forwarded requests from rural communities that barracks and
curfews be imposed on foreign farm workers, 18.6.43, BA R16/
162. See also investigation by RNS into complaints from foreign
agricultural workers, 1944-5, BA R16/174.

. SS SBF Brehm’s Report, 24.10.39, BA NS2/60.
. Brehm report. See also Rich, Hitler's War Aims, ii, 71. The border

was not determined for several months, and was disputed among
German officials until the war ended.

. 26.11.39, BA R75/13. Poniatowski villages were the Polish version

of the Wehrbauern settlement, which inspired Himmler. Border
villages were fortified, and Germans expelled from them, during
the 1920s. Koehl, RKFDYV, p. 44.

. 8,000 agricultural experts had been drafted by 1940, and 42,000 by

mid-1941. Hans-J. Riecke, ‘Der Raum in Osten’, DAP, Oct. 1941.
Riecke was head of Chefgruppe 1A Food and Agriculture in the
Economic Command Staff East in 1941.

. Brandt, Fortress Europe, pp. 36-8. Wheat down 21 per cent, rye

down 38 per cent, barley down 21 per cent, oats down 30 per cent,
potatoes down 12 per cent. See also Sering, Agrarverfassung, p. 179.

. "Beiträge zur Wehrstrukture Polens’, Reichsamt für wehrwirtschaftliche

Planung, July 1939, BA R24/788.

SS SBF Brehm, RuS Adviser to RFSS, 24.10.39, BA NS2/60.

Cited in Wheeler, ‘The SS’, p. 133. BDC Globocnik file. ‘Bericht
über Aufbau der SS und Polizeistiitzpunkte’, 18.7.41.

See D. Warriner, The Economics of Peasant Farming (London 1939),
pp. 21,133.

A. Hohenstein, Warthelandisches Tagebuch aus den Jahren 1941-2
(Stuttgart, 1961), pp. 53, 72.

Brehm report, op. cit. Underlining in original document, and see
pp. 7-10, BA R24/788. Ironically, the wheat surplus area was in
the Polish territory conceded to Russia. J. Gross, Polish Society
under German Occupation: the General Gouvernment 1939-44
(Princeton, 1979), p. 93; Brandt, Fortress Europe, p. 36.

Meyer, ‘Lebensbericht’, pp. 108-9. Intr., H. Heiber, “Das
Generalplan Ost’ (docs.), VjhfZg 6 (1958), 289.

Himmler to SS leaders at Danzig, 24.10.39, BA NS2/60.

Backe, G. B., p. 45. See also Kröger, Erhard, Der Auszug aus der
alten Heimat: Die Umsiedlung der Baltendeutschen (Tübingen, 1967),

247

Notes to pages 154-157

18.

20.

21.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

who makes a puzzled reference to Himmler’s ‘anachronistic
perspective’, p. 157.

Pancke to Himmler, 27.11.39, BA NS2/60.

. SS GF Hildebrandt, 26.11.39, BA R75/13.

Unsigned report of conversation with Gauleiter Greiser, 12.2.41,
BA R49/1/34.
Ibid.

. Siegmund to RuS, 13.2.41, BA R49/1/34.
. RFSS A/O. 24/1, 9.12.40, BA R49/4.

According to one report, 300,000 ha out of 3.4 m N
usable ha. March 1941, and Report by Dr Schmidt of the
Aussenstelle Ost, 8.5.41, BA R49/1/34.

Anon.,
den Ostgauen’, Der Diplomlandwirt (15.10.40).

Kummer (by this time drafted into the army) to Dr Horst
Rechenbach, an ex-official of the RuSHA. 19.4.40, BA NS26/947.
SS SBF Kunzel, of the Rasse-und Siedlungswesen Abt., Posen,
12.12.39, BA NS2/60.

Pancke to RFSS, referring to Hitler’s Mein Kampf and a speech by
Himmler on 13.12.39, saying ‘I would like to locate a blonde
province here’, 28.12.39, BA NS2/60.

Hofmann to RFSS, 17.840, BA NS2/50. Himmler rejected the
pamphlet as being ‘too theoretical for ordinary people’.

Kummer to the Danzig-West Prussia Settlement Society, 6.12.40,
BA NS26/943.

Schöpke, Prof. K., Deutsche Ostsiedlung (Berlin, 1943), pp. 6-7, 32-3,

44, 54-5. Idem, Der Ruf der Erde: Deutsche Siedlung in Vergangenheit

& Gegenwart (Leipzig and Berlin, 1935).

Auhagen, Dr. The report of 1940 was drawn up for the RKFDV.
‘Die Ansiedlung deutscher Bauern in den eingegliederten
Ostgebieten’, BA R49/20. Auhagen listed the various exchanges of
population which had taken place since the Versailles Treaty. In
1937, the same exchange proposal had been made to compensate
Poles with Russian land, thus ‘forging a German-Polish alliance’.
Zimmermann to Hauptmann Wiedemann, BA NS10/105.

‘Proposals for the Agricultural Settlement of the new German
areas’, by G. Blohm et al., quoted in Hartmann, Peter R., ‘Die
annexionistische Agrarsiedlungspolitik in den sogenannten

- “Eingegliederten Ostgebieten” (Reichsgau Danzig-West Preussen,

248

Reichsgau Wartheland, Regierungsbezirk Zichenau)’, Appendix
(Rostock, Diss. 1969).

‘Neubildung deutschen Bauerntums und Aufbauarbeiten in >

34.

35.

36.
. 16.6.40, BA R4311/223a.
38.

39,

40,
41.

42.

45.

Notes to pages 157-160

“Wirtschaftsziele eines Umsiedlerhofes im
Sachfragen und Tatbestände, in Neues Bauerntum (Jan.

Priebe, Hermann,
Warthegau’.
1941), p. 17.
12.2.41, BA R49/1/39. Typically, the report also attacked the old
Prussian Agricultural Commission: ‘It would have needed forty
years to do what we have done in one’.

June 1940, BA R 49/20.

The Germans from the South Tyrol, who were settled in Southern
Galicia in 1939-40, also come into this category. There is a good
coverage of the ethnic German problem in Sering, Agrarverfassung.
Between 1910 and 1934, the German population of Posen and
Pommerellen fell from 1.1m to 312,690. In August 1939, 70,000
recent refugees from Poland were in transit camps in Germany.
Meyer, ‘Lebensbericht’, p. 102. See also Schieder, Documents on the
Expulsion: Proudfoot, European Refugees 1939-51, (London, 1957).
The economic agreement signed with Russia, 19.8.39, was also
important. Rich, Hitler’s War Aims, i, p. 128.

Richard Bessel, ‘The SA in the Eastern Regions of Germany,
1925-30’ (Oxford, D.Phil. Thesis, 1980), ch. 1.

See Judgment in Darré’s trial, TWCN, xiv, 558-60.

See Kulischer, Eugene, M., The Displacement of Population in Europe
(Montreal, 1943, pub. International Labour Office), Map I. 93,000
Bessarabians; 21,000 Dobruja Germans; 98,000 Bukovinians; 68,000
Wolhyniens; 58,000 Galicians; 130,000 Baltic Germans; 38,500 E.
Poland; 72,000 Sudeten Germans; 13,000 Germans fram Slovenia: a
total of 591,500 people. See also H. Weiss, ‘Die Umsiedlung der
Deutschen aus Estland’, JBD (1964).

See Koehl, RKFDV, pp. 146 & 152, on Himmler and the German
plan in the East. Himmler tried to transcend his power limits in
1942, p. 147. Cf. Dallin who in German Rule in Russia, p. 255,
discusses plans for resettling the Crimea in 1942.

. Sering, Agrarverfassung, pp. 177-208, especially p. 183. °
. See Wiseley, W.C.,

‘The German Settlement of the Incorporated
Territories of the Wartheland and Danzig West-Prussia, 1939-45’
(London, Ph.D. Thesis, 1955), pp. 39~41, 43-9, 50-2.

See Broszat, NS Polenpolitik, p. 47, who puts the figure of
Germans murdered just after the German invasion at 6 to 7,000.
This controversy has received little publicity outside Germany, as
Goebbel’s propaganda trick just before the invasion has given the
impression that all Polish activity directed against Germans was

249

Notes to pages 160-162

48.

49.

50.

51.
52.

53.
54.

55.
56.

57.

250

Nazi propaganda. Nicholas Bethell, The War Hitler Won, (London,
1972), completely discounts the idea of large-scale Polish anti-
German measures, and accepts the ‘300’ figure, pp. 84, 143. See also
Rich, Hitlers War Aims, i, 129, and Koehl, RKFDV, p. 44. H.H.
Krausnick and H. Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltan-
schauungskrieges: Einsatzgruppen der SS & des SD 1938-42 (Stuttgart,
1981), p. 55, estimated a minimum of 1,000 German dead in
Bromberg and 4 to 6,000 German dead a few days later; Wiseley,
‘The German Settlement’, p. 108, estimates 10,000, mostly saboteurs.

. Sering, Agrarverfassung, p. 158.
. 78,000 sq. km of Danzig-West Prussia, of which 47,000 had been
German before the First World War; 7,800 sq. km of East Upper

Silesia; 17,000 sq. km of the Zichenau was annexed to East Prussia.
Brandt, Fortress Europe, p. 36. The St. Handbuch (1948), gives
figures of 90,000 sq. km and 9.9m. people. Cf. Broszat, NS
Polenpolitik, pp. 31-6.

Erlass des Fiihrers und Reichskanzlers zur Festigung deutschen
Volkstums, 7.10.39, Rk 26272 B, BA R49/12. Cf. Wheeler, ‘The
SS’, Ch. 1 & 2, Kochl, RKFDV, pp. 31-2.

SS Sturmbannführer Brehm to the leader of the RuS Central
Settlement Office, from Rielitz, 21.10.39, BA NS2/60.

Pancke to Himmler, Bericht der Reise zu dem Höheren SS und
Polizeiführer in Danzig und zu dem Höheren SS und P-F in Posen’,
20.11.39, BA NS2/60, and see Koehl, RKFDV, pp. 42-3.

‘Bericht’, Pancke to Himmler, 20.11.39, BA NS2/60.

Note of a meeting, 29.11.39, between Pancke, Himmler and v.

Holzschuher, 1.12.39, BA NS2/60. By December 1939, Greifelt |

was signing directives for Himmler, Koehl, RKFDY, p. 64.

Pancke to Himmler, 23.12.39, talk with Himmler, 27.12.39, BA
NS2/60.

Pancke to Himmler, enclosing a report by the RuS Advisory Staff,
20.11.39, BA NS2/60.

Himmler to Pancke, 28.11.39, BA NS2/60.

Himmler to Pancke, 12.12.39, and Pancke to Greifelt, 27.12.39, BA
NS2/60. See Krausnick, and Wilhelm, Die Truppe, on the role of
the Einsatzgruppen.

Pancke to Hildebrandt, 27.11.39, BA NS2/60. An undated report
from the RuS to Himmler claimed that ‘many urgently necessary
repairs had not been carried out because the competence of the
Reichskommissariat was being attacked. This fight over whose job it
is reaches right down to the lowest office positions’. BA NS2/56.

58.

59.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

Notes to pages 162-164

Von dem Bach to Pancke, 27.11.39, BA NS2/60. See Koehl,
RKFDV, p. 245, for Pancke’s later career in Denmark as Higher ©
Police Chief and SS Führer.

File note of a report by SS GF Hildebrandt, 26.11.39, BA R 75/13.
Figures on expected retumees are from a report by SS SF
Hoffmeyer, 23.5.40, BA R49/20.

. This was in response to criticism by the RNS in June 1940, when

NS Landpost ran a series of highly critical articles on the re-
settlement; Pancke to Himmler, 3.7.40, BA NS2/56. It was
probably not just an excuse. Himmler talked of ‘eventual’ re-
settlement of 150,000 Bessarabian and Lithuanian Germans in Feb.
1940, 6 months after the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, Koehl:
RKFDY, p. 82.

SS SF Hoffmeyer, Report, 23.5.40, BA R49/20. Hoffmeyer also noted
that conflicts of competence made negotiations difficult in Russian
occupied Poland. ‘If something is ordered by the NKVD, the military
will overrule it within an hour, and the local Soviet will then alter
it again ... In general, the NKVD is the strongest authority’, p. 2.
See Löber, Dietrich, A., ed. Diktierte Option: Die Umsiedlung der
Deutsch-Balten aus Estland & Lettland 1939-41 (Neuminster, 1972),
which stresses the improvisatory nature of the re-settlement.

Pancke to Himmler, undated report, pp. 127-32, BA NS2/56. For
orders regarding the VD see Anordnung, 24.11.39, 9.5.40, 10.8.41
and 15.12.41, where Himmler orders re-settlement, R49/4. See also
‘Die Organisation der Lager und die Aufnahme der VD in den
Lagern erfolgt durch die Vo-Méi-Stelle’, BA R49/20. ‘Pocket
money for Estonian, Latvian, Wolhynien, Galician, Narewian, S.
Tyrolean only. To be paid to those in assembly camps, and those
who cannot earn for themselves ... Ubergangsgelder to be paid to
Baltic Germans not in camps. 5 RM for adolescents, 3 RM per
child’, BA R49/12. See circulars on labour units to be formed
from VD in Altreich camps, in BA R16/17.

On evacuation see Broszat, NS Polenpolitik, p. 87 and Gross, Polish
Society, p. 71. Report, 3.7.40, BA NS2/56, esp. pp. 127-32.
Evacuation order for Polish dwarf farms 1942; 1 wagon per
household: (a) must take: important papers, clothing, food for five
days, gold and valuables, washing materials; (b) can take: bed
linen, bicycles, 1 animal p.c. (pet), Einzelmöbel; (c) NOT to take:
flour, fruit, fresh vegetables, agricultural machines, bees, large
animals, dogs. BA R75/10.

Sitzung no 35 re: Bessarabian Germans. Greifelt’s speech in Danzig

251

Notes to pages 164-165

66.

67.

68.

69.

70.
71.

72.

252

called for them to be given jobs in industry, 3.12.40, BA R49/12.
RFSS, Schnellbrief to administrators within the conquered
territories, 12.1.40, BA R49/12.

Pancke to Himmler, undated report, c. Aug. 1940, BA NS2/56.
See also Bannister, Sybil, I Lived under Hitler (London, 1956),
which describes life in wartime Bromberg and the surrounding
countryside, and gives a picture of two mutually hostile groups in
the Volksdeutsche and Reichsdeutsche, even the tennis club
membership was split down the middle. In a report to Himmler,
Pancke describes one Polish estate:

The owner, a senator, was shot some time ago for enmity
to Germans. The son makes an impression of extremely
low racial value, with a mongolian-tartar face ... speaks
only French with his mother. The German son of the
former owner, Count Schoenberg, we found on the farm,
in civilian dress ... eating with Poles at table. He should
not take over the farm.

20.11.39, BA NS2/60. See also Wiseley, ‘The German Settlement’,
pp. 256-7, pp. 263-4: Polish workers and peasants hostile to Polish
nationalism.

Melita Maschmann, Fazit, Kein Rechtfertigungsversuch (Stuttgart,
1963), p. 100.

Report by Vo-Mi Stelle, 23.5.40, BA R49/20. Report ‘Ein Jahr

Deutscher Ostsiedlung’, December 1940, by Bronia Alix Elsas, of

the SS Staff Office, on the ‘Nahplan 3’, BA R49/1/34.

Elsas report, R49/1/34.

Koehl, RKFDY, p. 73. 12,000 Balts were settled ‘with difficulty’ in
towns. See Greifelt to Einwanderungstelle Lodz, asking for
information on the size of the former homes of the Baltic
Germans, 12.5.40, BA R49/12, and Landrat Krotoschin to
Governor in Posen, ‘There are not enough large farms suitable for
Balts ... please do not send any more Balts ... I can only settle
peasants here’, 1.3.40, BA NS26/943. A report by W. Quering to
German Foreign Institute in Stuttgart described Greifelt’s speech on
the ethnic Germans as ‘Kopfwasche’, 12.4.40, BA R49/20.

Kruger to Frank, 25.3.41, BA R52/11/238, p. 7. Cited Wheeler,
‘The SS’, p. 101. See also the annual report of the DAG, ‘Because
of the shortage of labour, settlement activity remained confined
almost entirely to individual farms, and the continuation of

73.
74.

75.
by SS BFU. Greifelt, EWS Lodz, 26.3.41, BA R75/3. He gave

76.

77.

78.
79.
80.

81.

82.
83.

84.

Notes to pages 165-166

projects undertaken last year encountered great difficulties’,
31.12.41, BA R49/118, p. 1, cf. Rich, Hitlers War Aims, ii, 83: -
Himmler ordered evacuations to cease in May 1943.

Report 1941, 10.2.41, BA R49/1/34. l

Broszat, NS Polenpolitik, p. 97, ‘increasing pressure and resistance
among Polish population after evacuations’. See also SS Planning
Staff, Posen, Report, pp. 43-47, and p. 73, 12.2.41 and 1.4.41, BA
R49/1/34, and reports for 8.5. 41 and 1.9.41 in BA R49/120.

‘Lage und Stimmung der Polen des Umsiedlungsgebietes’. Report

examples of Poles offering hot milk for the children of the German
refugees, amidst ‘outbreaks of hate’, such as remarks like “You
Germans have not won the war yet, we have not lost Poland’. But
‘Several sources ... state that the German victory was received
with joy by the peasants in certain areas ... in many ethnically
Polish villages’. In general, Germans were received with least
hostility in the countryside. Gross, Polish Society, pp. 128 and 140.
Cf. Koehl, RKFDV, p. 122 who quotes Frank’s diary: 210,000
voluntary labourers by April 1940. Gross, Polish Society, p. 78
estimates that some 100,000 Polish workers volunteered in 1939/40,
and that the final proportion of volunteer workers was 15 per cent.
Agricultural work was the most unpopular.

SS Ansiedlung Stab Abt. 1, Report by SS BF Schelpmeyer,
24.1.42, BA R49/1/35. Polish labourers to Altreich, Broszat, NS
Polenpolitik, pp. 102-4.

Brandt, Fortress Europe, p. 41. Vegetable production increased 30
times, ibid., pp. 42, 49.

Report by R.M. Schmidt, Aussenstelle Ost, 8.5.41, R49/Anhang 1/
39

Priebe, H., ‘Wirtschaftsziele eines Umsiedlerhofes im Warthegau’,
Neues Bauerntum (Jan. 1941), BA NS26/948.

E.g., Himmler wrote of the need to make the Eastern landscapes
which currently were ‘identical to those of Bronze Age Europe’
come to resemble the cultivated fields of Schleswig-Holstein, 21.
12.42, BA R49/4.

Himmler, cited in Wheeler, “The SS’, pp. 96-7.

Correspondence 1942-3, re VD in transit camps in the Altreich, and
their recruitment for agricultural labour units, BA R16/164. In
June 1940, Greifelt called on German businessmen to offer jobs to
the Bessarabian Germans, BA R49/12.

DAG report of 1950, BA R49/25, p. 51.

253

Notes to pages 167-168

85.

86.

87.

88.

89.

90.
9.

92.
93.

254

R. Koehl, RKFDV, pp. 222-3. See Broszat, NS Polenpolitik, p. 41;
10,000 Poles and Jews had been murdered by Feb. 1940.
Documents from the Einwanderungsstelle, Lodz contain details of
the evacuations, BA R75/10 and R75/13.

On the psychological effects of the emptier, wilder countryside, see
Maschmann, Fazit, p. 104, but also Hohenstein, Tagebuch, pp. 299-
300, who found the untouched emptiness of the ‘new area’
stimulating, as he rode around it. Broszat describes the effect on
the Volksdeutsche of the sight of the dispossessed Poles, NS
Polenpolitik, p. 97. See also Wiseley, ‘The German Settlement’, p. 218.
See (unsigned) report on Bessarabian resettlement, pp. 14-20 (in
author’s possession). Sering, Agrarverfassung, p. 202. ‘The
Wolhynien German farming methods are still somewhat primitive
... there was a strong emphasis on grain production’. Sce also
Koehl, RKFDV, p. 99, who argues that they were a liability as
trustees of efficient, progressive farms in the Warthegau.

Léber, Dietrich, Diktierte Option, p. 60, calculated that 20 per cent of
the Estonian and Latvian German settlers are known to have been
killed; this figure did not include missing. See ibid., Part 3, pp.
633-97 for some post-war documents on this subject. The Volga
Germans in Russia probably suffered a worse fate. See also
Schieder, Documents on the Expulsion, G. Trittel, Die Bodenreform in
der Britischen Zone, 1945-49 (Stuttgart, 1975), p. 20. 8 million
refugees had arrived from the East by Spring 1947. De Zayas
estimates a total of 15 million German refugees. Nemesis at Potsdam
(London, 1979), p. xix.

E.g., ‘When one considers, besides, that the farms were ripped
from their former owners, then morally speaking one can only
welcome the quick end of the episode through the end of the war’,
Dr W. Lenz, ‘Erbhéfe fir baltische Restgutsbesitzer im Warthegau’,
JBD, xxix (1982), 127.

Gross, Polish Society, pp. 35-41.

See e.g. Krausnick & Wilhelm, Die Truppe, and Christian Streit,
Keine Kameraden (Stuttgart, 1978), for SS responsibility and the
Einsatzgruppen during the war.

Gross, Polish Society, p. 197.

Koehl, RKFDV, pp. 80ff. “The ascriptive interpretation of race had
to be abandoned little by little’, Gross, Polish Society, p. 196. See
also Struve, Elites Against Democracy, pp. 423-5, on the expedient
and ‘open-ended’ character of Himmler’s racial criteria, Koehl, The
Black Corps, p. 215.

uni Be re ee
TT a mem

94.

95.

96.

97.

98.

99.

100.Dallin,

Notes to pages 168-172

See correspondence from Brandt, Himmler’s adjutant, to Backhaus,
Backe’s personal assistant, 15.11.44 to 26.2.45, BA NS19neu/1004.
See Wheeler, “The SS’, Brandt, Fortress Europe, pp. 74, 78, chart of
the various authorities in the East, H. Buchheim, ‘Rechtstellung und
Organisation des RKfdFdV’, Gutachten des IfZG (Munich, 1958),
Eisenblätter, S., ‘Grundlinien der Politik des Reiches gegenüber
dem G-G 1939-1945’ (Frankfurt/M, Diss., 1969), Graf, H., ‘Zum
faschistischen Okkupationspolitik des deutschen Imperialismus
in Polen während des 2. Weltkrieges’ (Berlin, Diss., 1961).

Rich, Hitlers War Aims, i, disagrees, ‘When the war was at its
height in Russia ... peasants were shifted en masse from one end of
Europe to the other ...’, pp. 57-8. ,

See Koehl, RKFDV, ‘instead of real overall policy, the ad hoc
solutions to immediate problems became the major task of the
RKFDV, p. 225.

Brandt, Himmler adjutant, to Pancke, RuSHA, 24.2.40, BA NS2/
55.

Kochl, RKFDV, pp. 83-4, cannot find evidence of settlement
planning East of the incorporated areas after November 1941,
‘Meyer’s far-flung projects, resubmitted to Himmler in December
1942, were cut off in embryo by the fortunes of war’, p. 159.

German Rule in Russia, pp. 285-8, esp. 288: ‘The
Germanisation projects may seem visionary at first sight. Yet they
were an organic element of both doctrine and blueprints which the
Nazi leadership had adopted for the East ... a promotion of long-
range, theologically conditioned products rather than an
implementation of tasks that might have immediately contributed
to the War effort’.

101.See p.-155 above, Koehl, RKFDV, pp. 146-51, 152-6, 224-7,

Farquarson, Plough & Swastika, pp. 159-60 & 253-4.

NOTES TO CHAPTER EIGHT

R. Carson, Silent Spring (London, 1963). See P. Lowe and J.
Goyder, Environmental Groups in Politics (London, 1983), and P.
Kelly, Fighting for Hope (London, 1984).

. For the German Youth Movement, see P. Stachura, The German

Youth Movement, 1900-45 (London, 1981) and W. Lacqueur, Young
Germany (New York, 1962), Mosse, Crisis, passim, M. Kater, ‘Die
Artamanen’, HJ (1971) 213, Jost Hermand, ‘Meister Fidus;
Jugendstil-Hippie to Aryan Faddist’, Comparative Literary Studies,
XII, 3 (1975). For the Artamanen magazine, Die Kommenden, and

255

Notes to pages 173-175

aan

OoN

10.

256

the postcards, see BA NS/1285. R. Steiner, Two Essays on Haeckel,
(repr. New York, 1935).

. R. W. Darré (Carl Carlsson), ‘Bauer und Technik’, Klüter Blätter, 10

(1951). In reality, the average American farm was about 150 acres,
and well within the Erbhof limit, see Hayami and Ruttan,
Agricultural Development; an International Perspective (Baltimore,
1971).

. Darré to Todt re; Seifert, 14.1.37 and 15.1.37, BA NS10/29.

Nonetheless, Darré ordered hedgerows, copses and trees to be left as
protection for wild life, see 24.1.40, BA NS10/37. For the Todt
and Seifert compromise, see K. Ludwig’s very good study, Technik
und Ingenieure im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf, 1974), p. 338.

. H. Backe, G.B., p. 20. ;
. A. Seifert, ‘Die Versteppung Deutschlands’, Deutsche Technik, 4,

(1936), and see Darré’s Nachlas BA NL94II/1, 1a, for
correspondence on organic farming. One paper sent to Darré by
Seifert, not dated, argued that ‘classical scientific farming’ was a
nineteenth-century liberal phenomenon, unsuited to the new era. It
complained that imported artificial fertilisers, fodder and
insecticides were poisonous in nature, and laid an extra burden on
agriculture through transport costs. The writer called for a
revolution in German agriculture towards a ‘more peasant like,
natural, simple method ... independent of capital ownership’, but
emphasised the need for a complete re-thinking of agricultural
methods. ‘The mere re-building of old peasant methods cannot
help, because the internal interconnection of the old ways is gone;’

these were typical arguments, then and now, BA NL94II/1. Darré

kept a file of quotations from and comments on Steiner’s works.
BA NL941/33.

. Darré to Todt, op. cit.
. A. Nisbett, Konrad Lorenz (London, 1976), pp. 77-91.
. See R. Stauffer, ‘Haeckel, Darwin and Ecology’, Quarterly Review

of Biology, xxxii (1957). The word does not seem to have acquired
its normative sense until the mid-1930s.

Re-naming bio-dynamic farming, see Darré’s speech to the
National Peasant Council, 20.6.40, BA NS26/947.

In 1933, my first task was to secure Germany against a
blockade. It had to be as quick as possible, there was no
time to worry about the right and wrong method of doing
it ... I left the question of bio-dynamic farming open, and.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

Notes to pages 175-176

gave it no publicity. But after the armistice with France,
the danger of Germany’s hunger receded, though a
continental European blockade was still possible ... On
June 18th, I visited a farm worked on bio-dynamic methods

. and established that this method is the best. The results
speak clearly. If no explanation is forthcoming from
scientists and previous agricultural teaching, that’s their
affair, the achievement and the result are ours. I have
decided to support bio-dynamic farming...

Darré to Peuckert, 4.8.41, BA NS35/9; letter from chemical
company, G. Pacyna to Darré, 4.8.41, BA NL94H/1. On methane
gas for peasant energy production, BA NL941/27.

R.W. Darré, ‘Der Lebensbaum unserer Altfarden [sic] im Lichte
neuzeitlicher Naturwissenschaft’, Odal (July 1935).

For Ludovici’s articles, see BA NS26/945-6, and ‘Skizze zur
Gliederung der Bodenordnung’, c. 1936, in BA NS2/272, on the
land as ‘träger of organic nature ... bound to landscape ...
determining labour and economy’. Ludovici was representative for
settlement (probably urban and rural) in Hess’s office, see reports
submitted to Schaub, a Hitler adjutant, BA NS10/53. Darré
complained to Hess, 18.1.40, that Konrad Meyer had attacked ‘bio-
dynamic methods’, BA NS10/37.
Heydrich to Darré, 18.10.41, BA NL94H/1. The Union of
Anthroposophists was suspected of links with Freemasons, Jews and
pacifists when it was closed in 1935, Haushofer, Ideéngeschichte, p.
269.

Gauleiter Eggeling, formerly Keeper of the Seal, to Backe, re:
Himmler, and enclosing copy letter to Himmler asking for support
for the peasants, 1940, BA NL75/10, and see Riecke to Backe,
8.8.40, BA NL75/10, enclosing documents on organic farming. See
also E. Georg, Die Wirtschaftlichen Unternehmungen der SS
(Stuttgart, 1963), pp. 62-64, on Himmler’s organic farms. Darré’s
successor as head of the SS RuSHA sent Himmler a list of farms
which he visited in Poland after the German invasion, which
would be useful for organic production, 20.11.39, BA NS2/60.
Given the low level of articifial fertiliser use in Poland before the
Second World War, it cannot have been difficult to find such
places.

E.g., R. W. Darré, ‘Bauerntum, Landarbeiter und Explosivegefahr’,
10.3.34.

Notes to pages 176-178 -

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.
22.

23.

24.
25.

258

See here the works of Sir Albert Howard on compost and food

values, and Sir George Stapledon on grass utilisation, and also
G.V. Jacks and R.O. White, The Rape of the Earth (London,
1939).

Hellmut Bartsch, Erinnerungen eines Landwirts, mit Erganzungen zu

R. Steiner’s Landwirtschaftlicher Impuls und seine Erfaltung (Stuttgart,

no date).

Demeter, 1939, p. 155. The poem was entitled, ‘The Primacy of the
Living’.

RNS meeting and Darré’s visit, see Darré’s diary, 13.5.40 and
18.6.40. He complained that ‘Backe is always the same ... he

thinks in terms of paper and statistics, and never organically, bio-._

dynamically’. Backe’s widow comments that Backe was by no
means hostile to the organic farming movement, but added
revealingly that ‘he hated the ‘mystic twilight”’, interview with
Frau Backe, July 1981. See also Haushofer, Ideengeschichte, p. 271,
and p. 269 on Hess and the organic farming lobby. Darré sent
Backe a pamphlet extolling the virtues of brown bread as early as
February 1938, telling him that it was an important matter, with
the health ‘of the whole nation’ involved, 1.2.38, BA NL94II/20.
E.g., Landpost, 13.9.40.

Questionnaire and replies to party leaders, 9.5.41, BA NL94II/1,
and to RMEL Advisory Council, 19.5.41 in BA NS26/947. Darré
wrote to Backe warning him of his forthcoming campaign in
1941, 7.6.41, BA NL94II/1.

Schacht to Darré, 30.5.41, BA NL94II/1. Frick, who had been
exchanging letters with Dr Bartsch, was also sympathetic, 30.5.41,
ibid. Goering to Darré, 20.6.41, criticised ‘bio-dynamic propaganda’
because it would lower market deliveries, and should wait until
after the war. Darré replied confidently that many of the national
leaders were ‘positive’ in their attitude, and further, that ‘the
Reichsfiihrer SS [Himmler] in particular has built up agricultural
farms for the SS via Pohl which are to be farmed in a bio-dynamic
manner’, 30.6.41, both BA NL94II/1. Criticism of organic farming
methods came from Wagner, head of the civil administration in
Alsace, who commented that many local farmers had moved over
to organic farming, and had suffered losses in production of around
20% in the first year. 28.11.41, BA NL94II/ta.

Backe’s warning to Darré, 3.7.41, BA NL94II/1a.
Darré to Heydrich re; nudists, 12.5.39, BA NL9411/49. Darr& to
Himmler and head of the SS Police, opposing the proceedings

26.

27.

28.

31.

32.

Notes to pages 178-179

against the Anthroposophists, 28.6.41, BA NL94II/1 and 1a: Darré
to Bormann, saying that ‘members of the Anthroposophists Union
have nothing to reproach themselves with’, 7.7.41, BA NL94II/1a.
H.S. Chamberlain was hostile to Anthroposophy, ‘an offshoot of
Freemasonry and a danger to German values,’ see Field, Evangelist
of Race, p. 508. ,

Heydrich to Darré, 18.10.41, BA NL94II/1. Darré, undeterred,
appointed a working committee to study Steiner’s works and
organic farming, as part of his ‘Friends of the German Peasantry
Society’. They collected published and unpublished works by
Steiner, BA NL94II/1d.

Peuckert, staff member of the Reichsamt für Agrarpolitik, to Rust,
25.7.41, BA NL94II/1.

One top Anthroposophist, Dr R. Hauschka, gave evidence at Otto
Ohlendorfs Nuremberg trial. He wrote that it was only
Ohlendorf’s intervention at a Hitler Conference that saved him,
and four other Steiner men, from execution in 1941, an
intervention that riled Himmler and Heydrich. Hauschka thinks
that it was in revenge against this intervention that Ohlendorf was
sent to Russia to head an Einsatzgruppen squad. Darré may have
been lucky that the Allied assassination of Heydrich succeeded. See
Dr R. Hauschka, Wetterleuchten einer Zeitenwende (Frankfurt, 1966),
pp. 96-7, 101-2, and see also the. memoirs of another
Anthroposophist, Dr Wilhelm zur Linden, Blick durches Prisma:
Lebensbericht eines Arztes (Frankfurt, 1966), pp. 111-2, on
Ohlendorf. *

. Haushofer, Ideengeschichte, pp. 270-1.
. BBC talk by Rolf Gardiner, on the Europdische Bauernsendung,

September, 1940, transcript in author’s possession, and Gardiner to
Darre, 5.10.51, BA NL9411/20.

See Gardiner to Darré, on ‘Kinship in Husbandry’, 5.10.51,
Gardiner to Darré, 25.11.51, and Gardiner to Reischle, 23.7.51, re-
ference to Soil Association ‘at the head of this movement’, all BA
NL9411/20. On Gardiner’s estate and reafforestation, see J. Stewart
Collis, The Worm Forgives the Plough (London, 1973), passim.
See Bartsch, Erinnerungen, and Demeter literature of the present day.
The argument over organic farming and productivity is still
continuing. The Oxford Farming Conference of 8.1.85, heard
many speakers jeering at the idea that cheaper and healthier food
could be produced by ‘so-called organic methods’. The general
secretary of the Society of Chemical Industry was particularly

259

Notes to pages 180-183

33.

scathing. The director of the Government’s Agricultural and
Advisory Service said there was a need for continuing scientific
investigation, 9.1.85, The Times.

Dr H. Bartsch to Darré, 9.5.53, BA NL 941/11.

NOTES TO CHAPTER NINE

260

Notice of Darré’s sick leave; and notice that Backe was to take over
his duties, both 20.5.42, BA R43II/1143. Darré’s letter of
resignation, 13.5.42, the formal appointment of Backe as Minister,
9.2.44, also BA R4311/1143. Himmler told Lammers to press Hitler to
ensure Backe’s appointment, 11.2.32, ibid. The annotated tran-

script of the Radio London broadcast by Dr Wemer Clatt [sic] is in .

BA NL75/10-1. Dr Klatt was to be Darré’s interrogator. Darré’s
diary, 14.3.42, refers to Backe’s appointment, and see the ministry
budget, in BA R2/17897, 1.8.42, which shows Darré as Minister,
but Backe charged with carrying out all ministry business.

. Darré’s diary, 27.3.40. Cf Darré to Hitler, asking for sick leave,

14.6.37, BA NS10/35, and Darré to Lammers re; eczema, 1.11.40,
and asthma, 27.10.43, in BA R4311/1143. Hitler sent him a ‘get
well soon’ card, ibid.

. See correspondence, file pages 74-80, between Willikens, Lammers

and Darré, R431I/202a.

. TWCN, vol xiv, p. 277.

. Darré’s diary, 22.4.45.

. Report on agriculture, ED110/4, and in BA NL941/26. Accounts
of activities and people, and a history of the AD, BA NL94I1/28. .

For his arrest, ED110/4-32. H. Kehrl, Krisenmanager im Dritten
Reich; Erinnerungen (Düsseldorf, 1974), pp. 82-3. Erwin Goldmann,
Zwischen zwei Völkern; ein Rückblick (Königswinter, 1975), pp. 192-3.
See also, J. and D. Kimche, The Secret Roads (London, 1954).

. Report on Darré’s interrogation, by Dr Werner Klatt, April 1945,

Wiener Library, N4f Darre J 36, and see pages above.

. The Interrogator’s report is undated, but is filed after the 1947

interrogations, see IfCH, Darré’s interrogatian, no. 1948/56.

. Quoted in N. Bethell, The Last Secret (London, 1976), p. 248.

Proposals by American academics and dignitaries to exterminate or
just compulsorily sterilise all 80 million Germans were not only
made but were discussed seriously. One English writer, Louis
Nizer, in What to do About Germany (London, 1944), did, however,
reject a sterilisation plan (three months for all German males, three
years for all German women) put forward by a Harvard

Notes to pages 183-186

anthropologist, but for practical reasons, not out of maudlin

sentimentality, pp. 1-3. He also rejected plans to breed
aggressiveness out of the Germans by forcible exogeny, and
suggested compulsory labour service instead. One of Nizer’s
complaints was that some of the German patents seized by the US
after the First World War had turned out to be defective: ‘Never
Again’. See also, ed. A. Weymouth, Germany; Disease and
Treatment, published by the Parliamentary Policy Group (London,

. not dated), and Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Germany is Our Problem

10.

11.

12.

13.
14.
15.

16.

17.

(USA, 1945) for similar answers. Alfredo de Zayas quotes a
cheerful report by a Russian-born Sunday Times correspondent of
the Russian army’s attitude to mass rape. The correspondent
quotes an officer as saying, ‘They often raped old women of sixty
. seventy ... even eighty ... much to these grandmothers’
surprise, if not downright delight’, Nemesis at Potsdam (London,
1974), p. 69. The ignorance of one American counsel is
commented on by M. Biddiss, ‘The Nuremberg Trial: Two
Exercises in Judgment’, J]CH, 16 (1981), p. 603.
Klatt, op. cit., p. 1. One official, I. Peter Dawes, noted on one of
Darré’s 1941 letters that Backe seemed not to have divulged much
to Darre, BA NL9Y4 11/20.
See Biddiss, op. cit. The archivist’s introduction to the files of the
Ministry of Agriculture at Coblenz mentions that barely a quarter
of the files taken and stored by the Allies ever returned. Brandt,
Fortress Europe, refers in his introduction to Ministry of Agriculture
files in American private hands (1953). =
See SS affidavit, copy in author’s possession. Some 136,213
affidavits were filed for the SS defence, R.K. Woetzel, The
Nuremberg Trials in International Law (London, 1960), p. 2.
John and Ann Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial (London, 1983), p. 93.
IfCH 1947 Interrogation, file pages 00062-3.
These twelve trials, held between 1946 and 1949, have been
overshadowed by the trials of the top party leadership. The
charges, prosecution and defence statements and judgements are
published in Trials of the War Criminals, 1949 (TWCN), and
should not be confused with the published IMT trial and its
documents: The dissenting judgement by Judge Leon Powers, is in
TWCN, xiv, pp. 871-940.
Letter to author from Dr Hans Merkel, 16.4.84, Darré’s diary,
13.5.39.
See TWCN, xii-xiv, and Charter of the IMT, Articles 7, 8, 9, 10

261

Notes to pages 186-188

18.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

26.

27.

262

and 16, published i in TWCN, and also in Woetzel, The Nuremberg
Trials, pp. 248-250.
TWCN, xiv, p. 871.

. Although the legal and international status of the trials has been |

subject of considerable discussion, procedure has not. Translation
errors are mentioned in the introduction to TWCN, i, pp. iii-iv. A
careful reading of the material gives some idea of the problems.
See e.g., the transcripts in W. Maser, Nuremberg; A Nation on Trial
(London, 1977), Part II.

Observer, 30.5.37; P.R.O. MAF 39/20 plans drawn up in 1936 for
the operation of the ministry in wartime.

For food movements during the war, see Brandt, Fortress Europe. - .

See also Goering to Darré, February 1941, on the need to export
bread to the Protectorate, Belgium and Norway, BA NL94II/20.
Gross, Polish Society, pp. 103-4, 105-7, 109-13. The G-G was a
food deficit country. See also Bannister, I Lived under Hitler, for a
comparison of living standards in Poland and west Germany
during the war.

See reference to the dismantling and seizure of German factories in
A. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945-51 (London,
1984), p. 147, S. Siebel-Achenbach, ‘The Social and Political
Transformation of Lower Silesia, 1943-48’, Draft Oxford D. Phil
Thesis, and K. Belchling, ‘The Nuremberg Judgments’, in ed.
W.E. Benton and G. Grimm, Nuremberg: German Views of the War
Trials (Dallas, 1955), pp. 183-4. Not only were German prisoners-
of-war retained in the USA after the war for labour service, but as
many as possible were shipped out to America after the war for
that purpose. See report of 2.1.47, C.E. King, Political Division,
‘German Reactions to the Nuremberg Trials’, quoted in Biddiss,
op. cit., p. 613.

TWCN, xiv, 555-6. The judge’s remark pre-dated by some
twenty-seven years Britain’s Race Relations Act, which has been
seen as a totalitarian attack on free speech. The Judgment is in
TWCN, xiv, pp. 416-862, including the judgments on the other
defendants.

Op. cit., pp. 555-6.

. Op. cıt., p. 555.

Op. cit., p. 557. ‘Unquestionably, the proceeds of the Aryanisation
of farms and other Jewish property were in aid of and utilized in
the program of rearmament and aggression’.

See e.g., notes on preparation of rations in Backe’s papers, BA

31.
32.

. Ibid., p. 232.
34.

35.
36.

37.
38.

39.
40.

41.
42.

43.

. Darré, circular to RNS staff, 14.10.35, BA R16/2045.
45.

Du nn ie a a u an el nn ln a ee nen

Notes to pages 188-194

NL75/12-1, and Ministry of Agriculture decree of 26.6.44, BA -
R 431/614.

. TWCN, xiv, p. 560, and see chapter Four.
29.
30.

See discussion in Biddiss and Woetzel, op. cit.

Lutzhöft, Nordischer Gedanke, p. 23, but cf. Field, ‘Nordic Racism’,
p. 536, and see chapter Two.

R.W. Darré, ‘Walther Rathenau und das Problem des nordischen
Menschen, DE, 7, 1926, and, ibid., “Walther Rathenau und die
Bedeutung der Rasse in der Weltgeschichte,’ DE, 1928.

Neuadel, p. 230.

R.W. Darré, ‘Blut und Boden als Lebensgrundlage der nordischen

Rasse’, 22.6.30, reprinted Blut und Boden (Munich, 1941), pp. 17-

29.

R.W. Darre, ‘Das Schwein als Kriterium für nordische Völker und

Semiten’, DE, 3 (1927), and cf. R. Tannahill, Food in History

(London, 1973), p. 64.

R.W. Darré, ‘Damaschke und Marxismus’ (MS, 1931), in BA

NS26/949, and cf. published version in VB, Munich, 1.8.31,

substantially cut.

D. Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism (New York,

1971), pp. 119-20.

R.W. Darré, ‘Vom Friedenswillen der deutsche Bauer’, autumn

1934, in BA R16/2047.

E.g., speech by Darré in 27.3.36, BA NL94II/1f. ,

See R.W. Darre, ‘Stellungnahme des RBF zu der Frage, “RNS

und Juden” ’, 10.3.35, BA R16/2057.

See E.D. Harrison, draft D. Phil Thesis, Oxford, 1982.

Correspondence between Backe and RNS officials, 1940-2, BA
R14/266 and R14/267.

Darré, ‘Stellungnahme’.

Racial education, see Darré to a Norwegian nordicist, on need to
produce picture books of Nordic nudes, 12.8.35, BA R16/2045.
Letters about the error in Neues Volk are in BA NS2/74.

. E.g., Darré’s diary, 10.6.37, and Goldmann, op. cit. .
. Darré to Hitler, 11.12.39, BA NS10/37 and Darré’s diary, 11.12.39.

See also Darré’s speech of 27.3.36, BA NL94 II/1f.

. See de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, passim.
. TWCN, xiv, p. 824.
. Op. cit., pp. 861-2.

263

Notes to pages 194-198

51.

57.

58.
59.

264

The New York Times editorial; reported by the Jewish Telegraph
Agency (August 27th, 1950) and, 18.8.50, cutting in Wiener
Library files.

. Darré to Dr Merkel, copy letter in author’s possession, 31.10.50.

. Ibid.

. Darré to Lubbemaier, 26.5.53, BA NL9411/XI.

. See correspondence in BA NL941/20, and cf. R. Griffiths, Fellow

Travellers of the Right (London, 1980), PP. 74-5ff.

. Horthy and Darré, see Darré’s minute in NDG/157, and letters from

Hungarian veterans, ibid., letters from Horthy to Darré, BA
NL941/II, and Horthy’s Memoirs (Connecticut, 1957), p. 245.

Copy of Darré’s notes at meeting in author’s possession, 19- a

12.52, p. 2.

In ED110/XI. Interview with H. Haushofer, 10.4.84.

Goslarsche Zeitung, cutting in ED110/XI. Darré asked to be buried
in Goslar in his last will ‘because here the European peasantry
awoke and became self-aware’.

. See Carmen Albert (née Darré), telegram to Alma and letter,

thanking her for the roses, and describing the funeral, 10.9.53,
ED110/xX1.

|
|

Select Bibliography

SELECTED PUBLISHED WRITINGS OF DARRE

Many of Darré’s articles were published first in journals, then as
pamphlets, then in collected works. Articles referred to in this work
which were reprinted in Blut und Boden have not been listed separately.

a. BOOKS

Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell der nordischen Rasse, Munich, 1929.

Erkenntnisse und Werden, Aufsätze aud der Zeit vor der Machtergreifung, ed.
Marie Princess in Reuss zur Lippe, Goslar, 1940.

Neuadel aus Blut und Boden, Munich, 1930.

French Translation, La Race, tr. Melon, P., and Pfannstiel, A., Paris,
1939.

Um Blut und Boden: Reden und Aufsätze, ed. Hans Deetjens, Munich,
1941.

b. ARTICLES

‘Bauerntum, Landarbeiterfragen, und Explosivgefahr, Deutsche Zeitung
(10.4.34).

(pseud. Carl Carlsson), ‘Bauer und Technik’, Klüter Blätter, 10 (1951).

‘Blut und Boden: ein Grundgedanke des Nationalsozialismus’, Odal
(1935), 794-805.

Damaschke, die Bodenreform und der Marxismus, MS 1931, Pamphlet,
Munich, 1932, VB (1.8.31).

“Das Schwein als Kriterium für nordische Voelker und Semiten’, DE, 3
(1927).

' (pseud. Carl Carlsson), ‘Die Ackerkrume ist etwas Lebendiges’,

Goslarsche Zeitung (5.4. 42).
‘Gedanken zur Geschichte der Haustierwerding’, 1926, pr. 1940.
‘Im Kampf für die Seele des deutschen Bauern’, Pamphlet, Munich,
"1935:
‘Innere Kolonisation’, DE, 4 (1926), 152-5.
*Landstand und Staat’, VB (19-20.3.31).

265

Bibliography

“The National Food Estate’, Germany Speaks, London, 1938, pp. 148-

57.

“Walter Rathenau und das Problem des nordischen Menschen’, and
‘Walter Rathenau und die Bedeutung der Rasse in der
Weltgeschichte’, both DE 1926 and 1928 respectively, reprinted as
one pamphlet, Munich, 1933.

“Zucht und Sitte; Die Neuordnung unserer Lebensgesetze’, 1935, rep.
1942.

‘Zur Förderung der Rassenhygiene’, Volk und Rasse, 4 (1929).

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS

Abel, W., Agrarpolitik, Göttingen, 1967.

— Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur, Berlin 1935, repr. Hamburg, 1966.

Abraham, D., The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, Princeton, 1981.

Ackermann, J., Heinrich Himmler als Ideologe, Gottingen, 1970.

Ammon, Otto, Die Gesellschaftsordnung und ihre natürlichen Grundlagen,
Jena, 1895.

Anon., Die Leistungsfrage der Schweinehaltung (undated, c. 1935), in
series Die Deutsche Zeugungsschlacht.

— Report on Bessarabian Resettlement, MS, 1940.

Backe, H., ‘Ziele und Aufgaben der Nationalsozialistischen
Landvolkpolitik’, Speech, 23 February, 1944, pub. Munich, 1944.

— Das Ende des Liberalismus in der Wirtschaft, Berlin, 1938.

— Die Nährungsfreiheit Europas: Grossraum oder Weltwirtschaft? Berlin,
1942.

Baker, J., Race, Oxford, 1974.

Balfour, Lady. Eve, The Living Soil, London, 1941.

Bannister, S., I Lived Under Hitler, London, 1957.

Barkin, K., The Controversy over German Industrialisation, 1890-1902,
Chicago, 1972.

Bartsch, H., Erinnerungen eines Landwirts, not dated, Stuttgart.

Bauer-Mengelberg, K., Die Agrarfrage in Theorie und aktueller Politik,
Leipzig, 1931.

Bauer, Fischer, Lenz, Human Heredity, London, 1931.

Beck, J., Boehncke, H., and Vinnai, H., ed., Leben im Faschismus:
Terror und Hoffnung in Deutschland, 1933-45, Hamburg, 1980. .

266

Bibliography

Benton, W.E. and Grimm, G., ed., Nuremberg: German Views of the
War Trials, Dallas, 1955.

Berghahn, V., Der Stahlhelm: Bund der Frontsoldaten, Diisseldorf, 1966.

Bergmann,. Klaus, Agrarromantik und Grosstadtfeindschaft, Meisenheim
am Glan, 1970.

Bertrand, R., Le Corporatisme Agricole et L’Organisation des Marchés en
Allemagne, Paris, 1937.

— Le National-Socialisme et La Terre, Paris, 1938.

Bethell, N., The War Hitler Won, September 1939, London, 1972.

Bittermann, E., Die Landwirtschaftliche Produktion in Deutschland, 1800-
1950, 1955. Sonderdruck aus Kühn-Archiv, Band 70, 1956.

"Blackbourne, D., Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine

Germany, Yale, 1980.

Boberach, H., Meldungen aus dem Reich, Berlin, 1965.

Bollmus, R., Das Amt Rosenberg und seine Gegner: Zum Machtkampf im
national-sozialistischen Herrschaftssystem, Stuttgart, 1970.

Bracher, K.D., Die Deutsche Diktatur, Berlin, 1969.

Brandt, K., Management of Agriculture and Food in the German Occupied
and other Areas of Fortress Europe: A Study in Military Government,
Stanford, 1953.

Brentano, L., Agrarpolitik, Stuttgart, 1897.

British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee Overall Report no. 6,
Some Agricultural Aspects in Germany during the Period 1939-45,
London, 1948.

Brobbeck, W., Deutsche Getreidestatistik seit 1878, Berlin, 1939.

Brozsat, M., Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik, 1939-45, Stuttgart, 1961.

Buettner, J., Der Weg zum Nationalsozialistische Recht, Berlin, 1943: for
texts of laws on land, credit, etc.

Caplan, A.L., The Sociobiology Debate: Readings on the Ethical and
Scientific Issues, New York, 1978.

Cardinal, R., German Romantics in Context, London, 1975.

Carr, E.H., German-Soviet Relations Between the Two World Wars,
1919-1939, London, 1952.

Carsten, F.F., The Reichswehr and Politics, 1918-1933, Oxford, 1966,
rev., 1973.

Cecil, R., The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi
Ideology, London, 1972.

Chase, A., The Legacy of Malthus, New York, 1977: includes material
on Nazi eugenic ideas.

Chayanov, A., The Theory of Peasant Economy, ed., Thorner, D., et al.,
Ulinois, 1966.

267

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Control Council for Germany, Summary of Report on German
Resources and Technology in Agriculture, London, 1945.

Coudenhove-Kalergi, R.N., Adel, Leipzig, 1922.

Dallin, A., German Rule in Russia, 1941-45, London, 1957.

Damaschke, A., Aus Meinem Leben, Leipzig, 1924.

— Marxismus und Bodenreform, Jena, 1923.

Darré, R. Oskar, Meine Erziehung im Elternhause, Wiesbaden, c. 1925..

David, E., Sozialismus und Landwirtschaft, Berlin, 1903.

Dawson, W., The Evolution of Modern Germany, London, 1908, repr. 1919.

Decken, H.v.d., Der Deutsche Gemüsebau und seine Marktaussichten,
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Deschner, G., Heydrich: The Pursuit of Total Power, London, 1981.

Dietze, C. von, Preispolitik in der Welt Agrarkrise, Berlin, 1936.

Eley, G., Reshaping the Radical Right: Radical Nationalism and Political
Change after Bismarck, Yale, 1980.

Epstein, K., The Genesis of German Conservatism, Princeton, 1966.

Fallada, H., Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben, Berlin, 1931.

Farnsworth, Helen C., Wartime Food Developments in Germany,
Stanford, 1942.

Farquharson, J.E., The Plough and the Swastika: The NSDAP and
Agriculture in Germany, 1928-1945, London, 1976.

Field, G. C., Evangelist of Race: the Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart
Chamberlain, Columbia, 1981.

Franz, G., Quellen zur Geschichte des Deutschen Bauernstandes in der

Neuzeit, Munich, 1963.

Frauendorfer, S.v., and Haushofer, H., Ideengeschichte der Agrarwirtschaft
und Agrarpolitik im deutschen Sprachgebiet, 2 vols; vol. 1, Von den
Anfängen bis zum 1. Weltkrieg, Bonn, 1957.

Gasman, Daniel, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism; Social
Darwinism, Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League, New York/
London, 1971.

Georg, Enno, Die wirtschaftlichen Oniemichiuinges der SS, Stuttgart,
1963.

Gerschrenkron, A., Bread and Democracy in Germany, Berkeley, 1943.

Gesell, S., Die Neue Lehre vom Geld und Zins, Berlin, 1911.

Gessner, D., Agrarverbände in der Weimarer Republik, Düsseldorf, 1976.

Glombowski, F., Frontiers of Terror: the Fate of Schlageter and. his
Comrades, London: 1935.

268

Lene Tee SEE Rap ree ne en

Sos ieee en

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Greenwood, H., The German Revolution: London, 1934.

Griffiths, R., Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi
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Gritzbach, E., Hermann Goering: The Man and his Work, London, 1938.

Gross, Jan T., Polish Society under German Occupation: The General-

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Guillebaud, C.W., The Economic Recovery of Germany, 1933-1938,
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Haase, L., Aufstand in Niedersachsen, mim. 1942.

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Henning, F.-W., Landwirtschaft und ländliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland,
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Hertz-Eichenrode, D., Politik und Landwirtschaft in Ostpreussen, 1919-30,
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Hirschfield, G. and Kettenacker, L., Der ‘Fiuhrer-Staat’: Mythos und
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Höhne, H., The Order of the Death’s Head, New York, 1970.

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Ipsen, G., Das Landvolk: Ein soziologischer Versuch, Hamburg, 1933.

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Jacks, G. V. & Whyte, R.O., The Rape of the Earth, London, 1939.

Jasny, N., Bevölkerungsrückgang und Landwirtschaft, Berlin, 1931.

Kater, M. H., Das ‘Ahnenerbe’ der SS, 1935-45, Stuttgart, 1974.

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Kelly, A., The Descent of Darwin: the Popularisation of Darwinism in
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Klemperer, K. von, Germany’s New Conservatism, Princeton, 1957.

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Koch, W.H-J., Der Sozialdarwinismus, seine Entstehung und sein Einfluss
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Koehl, R.L., The Black Corps; the Structure and Power Struggles of the
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— RKFDV: German Resettlement and Population Policy, Cambridge,
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Krausnick, H., and Wilhelm, H.H., Die Truppe des Welt-
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Kröger, E., Der Auszug aus der alten Heimat. Die "Umsiedlung der
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Löber, D.A., Diktierte Option. Die Umsiedlung der Deutsch-Balten aus
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Lougee, R., Paul de Lagarde, a Study of Radical Conservatism in Germany,
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282

Index

AD, see National Socialist German Worker's

Party, Agricultural Department of.
Action Francaise, 66.

_ Agrarian League, the, 58, 88.

Ahnenerbe League, the, 49, 136.

Anschluss, the, 142.

Anthroposophisrs, the, 124, 172, 176, 178-179,
195, 200.

Anti-semitism, 3, 19, 33-37, 43, 48, 50, 83, 94-95,
162, 169, of Darré, 33-37, 77-78, 184, 187-93.

Arauner, Richard, 105.

Argentina, 13-14, 16, 21-22, 25.

Artamanen, the, 90, 101, 134, 157.

Aryan race, the, 40.

Auhagen, Dr Otto, 157.

Austria, 42.

` BUF, see British Union of Fascists.

Bach, von dem, 162.

Backe, Herbert, 7, 13, 90-118, 120-127, 133, 136,
141, 149-150, 173, 176, 179, 181, 193, 210, and
Darré, 7, 91-118, 120, 124-126, 128.

Backe, Ursula, 98-99, 102.

Bakunin, Michael, $.

Baldur, 40.

Baltic States, the, 18, 30.

Bartsch, Dr Eduard, 176, 178.

Bartsch, Hellmut, 180.

Balfour, Lady Eve, 195, 197.

‘Battle for Production’, the, 109, 177.

Bauhaus, the, 52, 59-60.

Bauernhochschulbewegung, the, 41.

Bauernvereine, see Peasant League, the.

Bavaria, 22, 33, 81.

Behr, von, 29.

Behrens, Gustav, 137.

Belgium, 186, 196.

Bismarck, Count Otto von, 58.

Billabeck, Karen von, 47, 197.

Blomberg, General von, 110.

‘Blood and Soil’, 6, 49, 54-63, 72, 75, 102, 104,
119, 125, 129, 158, 169, 183-185,
as agrarian reform, 8, 63-64, 85, 136, 179
as slogan, 1, 6, 9, 63, 176,

Bluhm, Agnes, 65.

Blut und Boden, see ‘Blood and Soil’.

Bölsche, Wilhelm, 20, 61, 174.

Bormann, Martin, 124-125, 137, 177-179.
Brandes, Ernst, 29, 103.

Brandt, Karl, 89.

Brazil, 13-14.

Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of, 18.

British Union of Fascists, che, 196.
Bruckmann, Frau, 77, 79.

Brückner, Wilhelm, 127.

Brüning, Heinrich, 79, 89, 102.

Capitalism, 50, 56,
and Darré, 38.
Carlsson, Carl (pseud), see Darré, Richard Walther.
Carson, Rachel, 171.
Centre Party, the, 83.
Chamberlain, Houston, Stewart, 23, 40-41, 44, 79,
206.
Chamberlain, Joseph, 45, 135.
Chamber of Nobles, the, 72.
Chayanoy, A., 7.
Chicherin, G. V., 97.
Christianity, 42, 50, 83.
Class, H., 80. op ee
Cobbett, William, 135, 199. `
Collis, John Stewart, 179.
Corporatism, 38, 59, 80.
Coudenhove-Kalergi, Count R.N., 46, 60.
Czechoslovakia, 95, 159, 186, 188.
Land reform in, 143.

DAG, see German Resettlement Society, the,

DNVP, see German National People’s Party, the,

DR V, German National Association for
Settlement Welfare, the, 142.

DVFP, see German People’s Freedom Party, the,

Damaschke, A., 55, 191.

Darré, Alma (b. Stadt), 20, 22, 47-48, 79, 80, 197,
210. :

Darré, Carmen, 44, 198.

Darré, Charlotte (Charly, b. Vietinghoff-Scheel),
47, 78.

Darré, Didi, 79-80.

Darré, Erich, 23, 45,

Darré, Ilse, 20, 22, 25.

Darré, Richard, Oskar, 13-14, 16-17, 23, 25, 30.

283

Index

Darré, Richard Walther, 1, ff.,
anti-Junker views of, 158,
anti-semitism of, 33-37, 77-78, 184, 187-193,
and Backe, Herbert, 7, 91-118, 120, 124-126,
128, 150,

capitalism and, 38,

career from 1896-1924, 13-26,

career from 1925-1931, 27-31,

career from 1942 onwards, 181-200,

as ‘Car} Carlsson’, 173, 197,

in East Prussia and Baltic, 26-29,

ecological ideas of, 171-180, 198-199,

and education, 14-15, 20-24, 31-32, 67-68,

in England, 15,

ethnic German resettlement and, 151-170, 188,

family of, 13, 22, 25, 47,

horse-breeding, interests of, 8, 22, 26-28,

internal colonisation and, 45,

Ireland and, 146,

and ‘little Germany’, 63-66,

military career of, 15-17,

as Minister of Agriculture, 4, 91-128,

National Food Estate, the, and, 8 et seq.,

nationality of, 13, 16,

naturism and, 20-21, 206,

Nazi attacks on, 129-150,

and the new nobility, 67~74, 205,

and the Nordic movement, 39-53, 57-58, 60,
62, 199,

as NSDAP member, 33, 51, 75-90, 183, 190,
201,

Nuremberg trial of, 54, 129, 185-189,

peasant movements and, 4-7, 29, 52-63, 73, 84-
85, 91, 131, 133, 199, 202-206,

„Poland and, 151-170, 186-188,

political views of, from 1923 to 1926, 31-38,

racia] selection policy of, 69-70, 192, 201, 205,

religious beliefs of, 60, 62,

and the SS Race and Settlement Office, 129-
150,

Wilhelmstrasse trial of, see Nuremberg trial of,
above.

Dawes, Charles, 37.

Dawes plan, the, 36-37.

De-Nazification, 9.

Denmark, 9, 41, 56, 89,
peasant movements in, 62.

Deutsche Ansiedlungsgesellschaf, see German
Resettlement Society, the,

Deutsche WVölkische Freiheitspartei, see German
People’s Freedom Party, the,

Deutscher Reichsverein für Siedlungspflege, see German
National Association for Settlement Welfare,
the,

Deutschlands Erneuerung, the, 52.

Deutschnationale Volkspartei, see German National
People’s Party, the,

Dietrich, Otto, 194.

Dietze, Constantin von, 89.

284

Dönitz, Admiral, 92, 128.

Druids, German Society of, see German Society of
* Druids,

Dwinger, Erich, 18, 124.

Dzherzhinsky, Felix, 97.

EEC Agriculturat Policy, 9, 200, 207.
EHG, see Hereditary Farm Law, the,
East Prussian Chamber of Agriculture, the, 26-29,
Ebert, Freidrich, 31, 45.
Eckhart, Dietrich, 97.
Ecological ideas of Darzé, 171-180, 198, 199.
see also Greens, the,
see also Organic farming.
Eggeling, Gauleiter, 105, 135, 176.
Eichenauer, Richard, 52.
Einstein, Albert, 35.
Engels, Frederick, 61.
Entailed Estates Law, the, 106, 121.
Erbhgofgesetz, see Hereditary Farm Law, the.
Erhardt, Captain, 19, 31-32, 83.
Estonia, 149.
Eugenics, 12, 42, 48, 52, 65-66, 68, 70-71.

FKG, see Entailed Estates Law, the.

Feder, Gottfried, 5, 76, 80, 97.

Fichte, Johann, 67.

Fidei-Kommissgesetz, see Entailed Estates Law, the.

‘Fidus’, see Höppener, Hugo,

Fighting League for German culture, the, 49,

Finland, 26, 28-30,

First World War, the, 5, 15-17, 19, 21, 31, 41, 43,
46, 49, 59, 65, 68-69, 94, 132, 159-160, 172,
206.

Flick, Friedrich, 194.

Flurscheim, 55.

Four Year Plan, the, 91, 110, 113-115, 118, 122,

127, 132, 144, 150, 156, 168, 193.
France, 6, 9, 13, 37, 95-96, 186.
Franck, Karl, 143.

Frankfurter Zeitung, the, 33.

Frederick the Great, 10.

Free-market economics, 9.

Freemasonry, 50, 70, 83, 95, 112.

Freikorps, the, 16, 18-19, 43, 82.

Frick, Wilhelm, 78.

Friends of the German Peasintry, Society of the,

47.

Frölich, Professor, 24, 26, 48.
Funk, Walther, 103, 125.

G-G. see Poland, non-incorporated,

Gandhi, M.K., 172.

Gardiner, R.olf, 179, 196.

Gass, Professor Elizabeth, 14.

Geheime Staatspolizei, see Gestapo, the,

General Gouvernement, see Poland, non-
incorporated, :

Genocide, 3, 184.

George, Henry, 8, 87, 191.
German Agricultural Society, the, 23-24.
German Army, the, 15-16, 113, 129.

High Command of, 135, 138, 158, 169, 202.
German Chamber of Agriculture, the, 29.
German Druids, Society of, 50.
German Labour Front, the, 49.
German National People’s Party, the, 81, 87-89,
- 102, 142, g
German People’s Freedom Party, the, 33, 183.
German-Polish Friendship Treaty, the, (1934), 160.
German Resettlernent Society, the, 141, 142.
German Richard Wagner Society, the, 49.

German Social Democratic Party, the, 18-19, 32,-

55, 87.

German-Soviet Trade Treaty, the (1925), 27.

German World View, League for, 49.

German Youth Movement, the, 83, 172.

Gesell, Silvio, 5. i

Gestapo, the, 143-144, 175, 178.

Gobineau, Count Arthur, 46.

Goebbels, Josef, 42, 54, 78, 84-85, 92, 109, 124.

Goerdeler, Carl, 109.

Goering, Hermann, 78, 91, 103, 107-108, 110-121,
124-127, 132, 151, 155-156, 158, 177-178, 187,
194, 202.

Goldmann, Erwin, 182.

Goldsmith, Edward, 199.

Gottberg, Curt von, 141, 142, 145, 188.

Gräfe, A. von, 33.

Granzow, Walter, 140-141.
Great Britain, 9, 41, 49,
Greece, 6.

Greens, the, 9,

Darré and, 199,

National Socialism and, 171-180, 200.
Greifelt, SS Brigade-Führer Ulrich, 149, 161.
Greiser, Gauleiter, 154-155.

Gronow, E., 95.

Gropius, Walter, 60.

Gross, Jan, 168.

Gross, Theo, 92, 95, 142.

Grotjahn, Alfred, 65.

Guardians of Plato, the, 72.

Guevara, Che, 38.

Günther, Hans, 40-45, 48, 51-52, 59, 69-70, 75, 78,

189.

Gürtner, Franz, 121.

Haase, Dr Ludolf, 94-95, 97, 99, 175.
Habicht, Theo, 33, 75, 88.

Haeckel, Ernst, 60, 174.

Hamsun, Knut, 41.

Hanfstaengl, Ernst, 81.

Hanover Chamber of Agriculture, the, 97.
Hardt, Richard von, 14.

Index

Haushofer, General Professor Karl, 80, 97.

Hayler, Franz, 126.

Heidegger, Martin, 12, 75.

Henlein, Konrad, 143-144.

Hentschel, Willibald, 41.

Herder, Johann, 43.

Hereditary Farm Law, the, 58, 71, 74, 91, 104,
105, 108, 183, 184.

Hess, Rudolf, 13, 78, 175, 177-179.

Herzberg, von, 80.

Heydrich, Reinhard, 92, 95, 99, 126, 143, 175,
178-179, 185.

Hierl, Konstantin, 76.

Hildebrandt, Richard, 136, 142, 152, 161.

Himmler, Heinrich, 54, 71, 75-76, 85, 89-91, 111-
113, 117, 122, 126, 129, 130-141, 143-156, 158-
159, 161-162, 164, 166-169, 176, 178, 188, 202,
211.

Hindenburg, Field Marshall Paul von, 31, 79, 103.

Hitler, Adolf, 3, 13, 19, 32-33, 38, 42, 49, 61, 63-
64, 74, 76-77, 79-81, 83, 85-86, 91-92, 95-96,
98-103, 106-108, 110, 116-117, 119-122, 124-
127, 130, 133, 144, 158-159, 173, 177, 179, 187,
190, 192, 207.

Hofmann, Otto, 136, 156.

Holdefleiss, Professor Hans, 48, 75.

Holland, see, Netherlands, the,

Holzchuher, SS Freiherr von, 161.

Höppener, Hugo (‘Fidus’), 21, 171.

Hore-Belisha, Leslie, 193, 209.

Horthy, Admiral Nicolas, 22, 196.

Howard, Sir Albert, 197.

Hugenberg, Alfred, 30, 58, 76, 83, 101-104.

Hungary, 22, 35, 122, 148.

Huxley, T. H., 195.

Industrialisation, 9-10. >
Internal colonisation, 45, 64, 134, 146.
Internal resettlement, 151, 179.

Israel, 6. '

Italy, 9, 117, 122.

Jefferson, Thomas, 7, 147, 179, 187.
Jenks, Jorian, 196.

Jesuits, the, 66, 79, 130.

Johst, Hans, 75.

Jung, Dr Edgar, 29, 64-65, 206.
Jünger, Ernst, 75, 206.

Junkers, the, 2, 81, 106, 120.

KPD, the, 19, 30, 32, 88.
Kaltenbrunner, Ernst, 192.
Kamenev, L., 97.

Kapp, Wolfgang, 19, 32.
Kehrl, Hans, 120, 182.

Keitel, Wilhelm, 124.
Kenstler, Dr Georg, 55, 59, 76.
Kern, Professor Fritz, 51.
Kerrl, Hans, 103.

285

Index

Keynes, John Maynard, 5, 34-35.

Keys, Ellen, 13.

Kochl, Robert L., 92, 166.

Konopacki-Konopath, Professor Hanno, 46, 48-50,
75, 78,84.

Korner, Paul, 113, 184.

Krämer, Professor, 24, 26, 28.

Kreisbauernfithrer, see State peasant leaders.

Krosigk, Schwerin von, 184.

Krylenko, N. V., 97. ` ;

Kummer, Dr Kurt, 132, 138-139, 145, 156-157.

LBF, see State peasant leaders.
Lagarde, Paul de, 23-24.
Lagergren, Eleanor, 13.
Lagerlof, Selma, 42.
Lammers, Dr Hans, 124, 143-144, 146-148, 188.
Land reform,
in Czechoslovakia, 143-144,
ideals of, 8-10
Landesbauernfithrer, see Stare peasant leaders.
Landfried, 126.
Langbehn, Julius, 43-44, 60.
Lasalle, Ferdinand, 36.
Latvia, 30, 149.
Leers, Johann von, 49-50.
Lehmann, Julius, 52, 76, 78-80, 189-190.
Lenin, V. I., 96-97, 119.
Lenz, Professor, 41, 60, 66.
Levy, Dr Oscar, 46.
Ley, Dr R., 108-109, 194.
Liebenfels, Lanz von, 42.
Lippe, Erdprinz zur, 47, 206.
Lippe, Princess Marie Adelheid Reuss zur, 46-49,
84, 95.
List, Friedrich, 114.
Littwitz, General von, 19.
Locarno Pact, the, 36.
Lorenz, Konrad, 174.
Lösch, Dr von, 29.
Löwenstein, Prince zu, 88.
Lower Saxony, 13, 81.
Ludendorff, General Erich von, 66, 83.
Ludovici, Dr A., 175.
Lunacharsky, A. V., 97.
Luther, Martin, 40.
Luxembourg, 97.

Maeterlinck, 66.

Mann, Golo, 2, 19.

Mann, Thomas, 35.

Marx, Karl, 3, 36.

Meinberg, W., 95.

Merkel, Dr Hans, 54, 178, 185, 187, 195-196.
Metzger, Dr Carl, 29.

Metzner, Erwin, 76.

Mexico, 24.

Meyer, Konrad, 54, 131-132, 146, 154, 161, 168.

286

Ministries trials, che, see Withelmstrasse trials, the.
Moeller van den Bruck, 61, 65, 206.

Moltke, Helmuth von, 67.

Moritz, 112.

Monis, William, 40.

Mosse, George, 50.

Mussolini, Benito, 127.

NSDAP, See National Socialist German Worker's
Party, the,

National Bolsheviks, the, 27.

National Commissariat for the Strengthening of
Germanness, 131-133, 135, 146, 148-149, 159,
161-163, 166.

National Food Estate, 9, 91, 104-106, 108-109,
111, 115-116, 122, 125, 135-137, 139, 140, 143-
144, 147-148, 152, 158, 165, 177-178, 182, 185-
186, 188, 192, 196, 201-202. f

National Ministry of Food and Agriculture, ‘the,
30, 91-92, 136-140, 144, 146, 151, 162, 169,
173, 175, 177, 182.

National Peasant Council, the, 46, 76, 198.

National Socialism, 3-6, 10, 12, 33, 50, 75, 91-92,
95, 127, 131, 172, 199,
of Hitler, 42,
rural ideology of, 8, 11, 201.

National Socialist German Worker's Party, the,
30, 32, 34, 75-76, 79, 86, 90, 93-95, 100, 177,
130, 138, 140, 164, 175-176, 179, 207,
Agricultural Department of, 84-89, 98-99, 101,
104-105,
agricultural policies of, 76-77, 80, 102, 134,
ecological theories of, 171-180.

National Socialist Welfare Organisation, the, 163.

National Union of Fertiliser Rerailers, the, 59.

Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, see
National Socialist German Worker’s Party,

Naturism, 10-11, 20-21, 50,

Darr& and, 20-21, 50, 206.

Naumann, F., 191.

Nazi Germany, 2, 4, 10.

Nazi Party, the, see National Socialist German
Worker's Party, the,

Nazism, 40,
see also National Socialism,

Netherlands, the, 41, 43-44, 89.

‘New Order’, che, 168.

Newron, Sir Isaac, 3.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 46, 207.

Nolte, Ernst, 207.

Nordic movement, the, 39-53,

Darré and, 39-53, 57-58, 60, 62, 199.

Nordic race, the, 39-42, 55, 71, 73-74, 199.

Nordic Ring, the, 24, 46-51, 62, 75, 78, 90, 199.

Nordic Youth Group, the, 49.

Northern Beliefs, the Society for, 49.

Northern Order, the, 49.

Norway, 186.

Noske, G., 19.

Nuremberg trial, the, 54, 92, 142, 146, 184-185,
210, see also Wilhelmstrasse trials, the.

OKW, see German Army, the, High Command
of,

Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, see German Army,
the, High Command of,

Ohst, Professor Erich, 97-98.

„Ohlendorf, Otto, 178.

Oldenburg, 10, 164.
Organic Farming, 118, 124, 171, 175-179, 195,
200.

Pan-German League, the, 80.

Pancke, Gustav, 133, 136, 140, 142-145, 148, 154,
156, 161-162.

Papen, Franz von, 65, 103.

Papworth, John, 200.

Parchmann, 110.

Pareto, Vilfredo, 73:

Peasant League, the, 4, 7.

Peasant movement, the, 29, 52-53, 83-84, 152,
157,
Darré and, 4-7, 29, 52-63, 73, 84-85, 97, 131,
133, 199, 202-206,
of Denmark, 62.

Pictzsch, 78.

Plato, 119.

Ploetz, Alfred, 65.

Pohl, Professor, 48.

Poland, 9, 18, 95, 146-149, 186-188, 193,
Darre and, 151-170,
nationalism in, 19,
non-incorporated, 132, 165,
‘Poniatowski’ villages of, 160.

Prague Land Office, the, 141-150, 162.

Priebe, Hermann, 166.

Prussia, 13, 15, 28, 30,

- militarism of, 2.
see also Prussian Ministry of Agriculture, the,

Prussian Inheritance Law, the, 103.

Prussian Ministry of Agriculture, the, 25, 27-29,
86, 101, 132, 143.

‘Prussianism’, 8.

RKFDV, see National Commissariat for the
Strengthening of Germanness, the,

RMEL, see National Ministry of Food and
Agriculture, the,

RNS, see National Food Estate, the,

RUS, see Race and Settlement Office, the,

RuSHA, see SS Race and Settlement Main Office,
the,

Race and Settlement Office, the, 159, 161-162.

Racial Hygiene, the Society for, 24.

Racialism, 3, 199, 201, 204, 206.

Rapallo, Treaty of, the (1922), 27, 96.

Rasse-und Siedlungsamt, see Race and Settlement
Office, the, :

Rathenau, Walther, 45-46, 189.

Index

Rechenbach, Dr Horst, 76.

‘Red Halle’, 31, f

Reichskommissariat für die Festigung deutschen
Volkstums, see National Commissariac for the
Strengthening of Germanness, the,

Reichsministerium für Ernährung und
Landwirtschaft, see National Ministry of Food
and Agriculture, the,

Reischle, Dr Hermann, 136.

Rhineland, the, 17, 42, 81, 93.

Rhodes, Cecil, 45.

Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the, 118, 159.

‚Ricardo, David, 191.

Riecke, Hans-J., 85, 141.

Rogge-Börner, Sophie, 52.

Rohe, Mies van der, 60.

Rohr, Joachim von, 101-102, 105.

Romania, 9, 55.

Römer, Professor, 48.

Roosevelt, President Franklin D., 176.
Rosenberg, Alfred, 13, 61-62, 69, 78, 160, 168.
Rosicrucianism, 3.

Ruhland, Professor Gustave, 58-59, 80, 98-99.
Ruhr, the occupation of, 31.

Rykov, A. L, 97.

SA (Sturmabteilung), 94, 99-100, 137.

SPD. See German Social Democratic Party, the,

Saaleck, 78.

Salomon, Ernst von, 43, 45, 82.

Savigny, F.C. von, 67.

Scandinavia, 39, 41-42, 49.

Schacht, Hjalmar, 103, 105-106, 110, 113, 116,
177-178.

Scharnhorst, 67.

Scheltenberg, Walter, 185.

Schirach, Baldur von, 78. `».

Schleicher, Chancellor General Kurt von, 27, 59,
88, 101.

Schlieffen, General, 67.

Schleswig-Holstein, 9, 43, 81-82.

Schöpke, 156-157.

Schmitt, 105.

Schultze-Naumburg, Paul, 42, 47, 49-50, 59-60,
75, 77-78, 206.

Schumacher, F. E., 200.

Schutzstaffel, see SS.

Second World War, the, 5, 35, 99, 171, 186, 199,
207.

Seeckt, General von, 27, 32, 67-68, 70.

Seifert, Alwin, 173-174, 178.

Sering, Max, 132. .

Seyss-Inquart, Govemer, 142.

Skald Order, the, 78, 95, 9, 126.

Social Democrats, 9,
see also German Social Democratic Party, che,

Social Darwinism, 3.

Soil Association, the (in England), 179, 195.

South-West Africa, 24-25.

287

Index

Sovier Union, the, 4, 8, 27-28, 35, 66, 96-97, 123,
124, 127-128, 134, 146, 153, 169,
agriculture in, 127, 202.
armed forces of, 167,
Bolshevik government of, 18, 123,
de-collectivisation in, 92.

Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, see German
Social Democratic Party, the,

Spain, 9. 5

Spann, Othmar, 64.

Spengler, Oswald, 61, 65, 173, 206.

SS, 9, 49, 61, 72, 129, 132, 134, 188, 194,
allgemeine, 89,
Darté and, 129-150,
Race and Settlement Main Office, the, 72, 76,
90, 92, 129-150, 152, 154-156, 162, 192, 194
Waffen SS, 163, 168.

SS Rasse-und Siediungs Hauptamt, see SS Race and
Settlement Main Office.

Stahlhelm, 18, 31-32, 89, 112.

Stalin, Josef, 35.

Stapleton, Sir George, 197.

State peasant leaders, 100, 112, 137-38, 144.

Stavisky, 36.

Stein, Freiherr vom, 10.

Steiner, Rudolf, 172-176, 179, 195.

Stoddard, Lothrop, 68.

Storm Division, see SA, the,

Serasser, Gregor, 5, 76, 80, 97, 133.

Strasser, Otto, 80.

Streicher, Julius, 194.

Stresemann, Gustav, 30.

Sturmabteilung, see SA, the,

Stumfe, Dr, 132.

Sweden, 66.

Switzerland, 44.

Teutonic Knights, the, 50.
Theosophy, 175.

Third World the, 2, 6, 37, 39, 199,
Thien, J. von, 7, 122.

Todt, Dr Fritz, 173.

288

Tolkien, J. R., 40.
Trakhener horses, 26-28.
Trotsky, Leon, 35, 97.
Tucholsky, Kurt, 63, 129.

UFA film studios, 81.

USA, see, United States of America, the,

USSR, see Soviet Union, the,

Ukraine, the, 9, 18, 127, 169, 187.

United States of America, the, 6, 11, 24, 36-37,
41, 68, 72, 97. :

Upper Silesia, 17.

Urbanisation, 5, 74, 190.

Utopianism, 1, 11, 73, 119, 174, 206.

Wagener, Otto, 80.

Wandervögel, the, 172.

Weber, Max, 41, 73.

Wehrmacht, the, see German Army, the,

Weiszäcker, Ernst von, 184.

Weirnar Republic, the, 18-19, 27, 34, 37, 83, 87,
96, 102, 150, 173.

Westphalia, 82, 88.

Wilhelmstrasse trials, the, 129, 184-185,
of Darré, 54, 129, 185-189.

Willikens, Werner, 76, 98, 101, 103-104, 136, 151.

Winnig, August, 55.

Wirsing, Giselher, 92.

Versailles Treaty of, the (1919), 17, 27, 63.
Vietinghoff-Scheel, Freiherr von, 47, 48.
Vogelweide, Walter van der, 23.

Vogt, Carl, 206.

Wölkische movement, the, 33, 36, 59-60, 66, 70, 78.

Young Nordic League, the, 69.

Zicgler, Dr Hans Severus, 75, 77-78.
Zimmerman, Ferdinand, Fried, 92.
Zinoviev, C. E., 97.

Zionism, 35, 182.

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